The higher powers of mind and spirit

EX

THE HIGHER POWERS
OF MIND AND SPIRIT

BY

RALPH WALDO TRINE

NEW YORK

DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY

EIGHTH AVENUE

33d Street 34th Street

Copyright, 1917
BY RALPH WAI.DO THINK

FOREWORD

We are all dwellers in two kingdoms,
the inner kingdom, the kingdom of the mind
and spirit, and the outer kingdom, that of the
body and the physical universe about us. In
the former, the kingdom of the unseen, lie
the silent, subtle forces that are continually
determining, and with exact precision, the
conditions of the latter.

To strike the right balance in life is one of
the supreme essentials of all successful living.
We must work, for we must have bread. We
require other things than bread. They are
not only valuable, comfortable, but necessary.
It is a dumb, stolid being, however, who does
not realize that life consists of more than
these. They spell mere existence, not abun-
dance, fullness of life.

We can become so absorbed in making a
living that we have no time for Ih-ing. To be
capable and efficient in one's work is a splendid
thing; but efficiency can be made a great
mechanical device that robs life of far more
than it returns it. A nation can become so
possessed, and even obsessed, with the idea of

3

16S--M54

4 FOREWORD

power and grandeur through efficiency and
organisation, that it becomes a great machine
and robs its people of the finer fruits of life
that spring from a wisely subordinated and
co-ordinated individuality. Here again it is
the wise balance that determines all.

Our prevailing thoughts and emotions de-
termine, and with absolute accuracy, the pre-
vailing conditions of our outward, material life,
and likewise the prevailing conditions of our
bodily life. Would we have any conditions
different in the latter we must then make the
necessary changes in the former. The silent,
subtle forces of mind and spirit, ceaselessly
at work, are continually moulding these out-
ward and these bodily conditions.

He makes a fundamental error who thinks
that these are mere sentimental things in life,
vague and intangible. They are, as great num-
bers are now realising, the great and elemental
things in life, the only things that in the end
really count. The normal man or woman can
never find real and abiding satisfaction in the
mere possessions, the mere accessories of life.
There is an eternal something within that
forbids it. That is the reason why, of late
years, so many of our big men of affairs, so
many in various public walks in life, likewise
many women of splendid equipment and with
large possessions, have been and are turning

FOREWORD 5

so eagerly to the very things we are consider-
ing. To be a mere huckster, many of our big
men are finding, cannot bring satisfaction, even
though his operations run into millions in the
year.

And happy is the young man or the young
woman who, while the bulk of life still lies
ahead, realises that it is the things of the
mind and the spirit — the fundamental things
in life — that really count; that here lie the
forces that are to be understood and to be
used in moulding the every-day conditions
and affairs of life ; that the springs of life are
all from within, that as is the inner so always
and inevitably will be the outer.

To present certain facts that may be con-
ducive to the realisation of this more abun-
dant life is the author's purpose and plan.

R. W. T.

Sunnybrat Farm,

Crolon-on- Hudson,

Neia York-

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. The Silent, Subtle Building Forces of

Mind and Spirit 9

II. Soul, Mind, Body — The Subconscious

Mind That Interrelates Them . . 19

III. The Way Mind Through the Subcon-

scious Mind Builds Body 37

IV. The Powerful Aid of the Mind in Re-

building Body — How Body Helps

Mind 50

V. Thought as a Force in Daily Living . 63
VI. Jesus the Supreme Exponent of the
Inner Forces and Powers: His Peo-
ple's Religion and Their Condition . 76
VII. The Divine Rule in the Mind and Heart:
The Unessentials We Drop— The

Spirit Abides 89

VIII. If We Seek the Essence of His Revela-
tion, and the Purpose of His Life . 113
IX. His Purpose of Lifting Up, Energising,
Beautifying, and Saving the Entire
Life: The Saving of the Soul is Sec-
ondary; but Follows .... 140
X. Some Methods of Attainment . • . . 152
XI. Some Methods of Expression . . . 173

XII. The World War— Its Meaning and Its

Lessons for Us 191

XIII. Our Sole Agency of International

Peace, and International Concord . 215
7

THE HIGHER POWERS
OF

MIND AND SPIRIT

THE SILENT, SUBTLE BUILDING FORCES
OF MIND AND SPIRIT

There are moments in the lives of all of us
when we catch glimpses of a life— our life —
that is infinitely beyond the life we are now
living. We realise that we are living below
our possibilities. We long fpr the realisation
of the life that we feel should be.

Instinctively we perceive that there are
within us powers and forces that we are mak-
ing but inadequate use of, and others that
we are scarcely using at all. Practical meta-
physics, a more simplified and concrete psy-
chology, well-known laws of mental and
spiritual science, confirm us in this conclusion.

Our own William James, he who so splen-
didly related psychology, philosophy, and even
religion, to life in a supreme degree, honoured
his calling and did a tremendous service for all
9

io HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

mankind, when he so clearly developed the
fact that we have within us powers and forces
that we are making all too little use of — that
we have within us great reservoirs of power
that we have as yet scarcely tapped.

The men and the women who are awake to
these inner helps — these directing, moulding,
and sustaining powers and forces that belong
to the realm of mind and spirit — are never to be
found among those who ask: Is life worth
the living? For them life has been multiplied
two, ten, a hundred fold.

It is not ordinarily because we are not in-
terested in these things, for instinctively we
feel them of value; and furthermore our
observations and experiences confirm us in
this thought. The pressing cares of the every-
day life — in the great bulk of cases, the bread
and butter problem of life, which is after all
the problem of ninety-nine out of every hun-
dred— all seem to conspire to keep us from giv-
ing the time and attention to them that we
feel we should give them. But we lose thereby
tremendous helps to the daily living.

Through the body and its avenues of sense,
we are intimately related to the physical uni-
verse about us. Through the soul and spirit
we are related to the Infinite Power that is
the animating, the sustaining force — the Life
Force — of all objective material forms. It is

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT n

through the medium of the mind that we are
able consciously to relate the two. Through
it we are able to realise the laws that underlie
the workings of the spirit; and to open our-
selves that they may become the dominating
forces of our lives.

There is a divine current that will bear us
with peace and safety on its bosom if we are
wise and diligent enough to find it and go
with it. Battling against tho current is always
hard and uncertain. Going with the current
lightens the labours of the journey. Instead
of being continually uncertain and even ex-
hausted in the mere efforts of getting through,
we have time for the enjoyments along the
way, as well as the ability to call a word of
cheer or to lend a hand to the neighbour, also
on the way.

The natural, normal life is by a law divine
under the guidance of the spirit. It is only
when we fail to seek and to follow this guid-
ance, or when we deliberately take ourselves
from under its influence, that uncertainties
arise, legitimate longings go unfulfilled, and
that violated laws bring their penalties.

It is well that we remember always that
violated law carries with it its own penalty.
The Supreme Intelligence— God, if you please
— does not punish. He works through the
channel of great immutable systems of law.

12 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

It is ours to find these laws. That is what
mind, intelligence, is for. Knowing them we
can then obey them and reap the beneficent
results that are always a part of their ful-
filment; knowingly or unknowingly, inten-
tionally or unintentionally, we can fail to
observe them, we can violate them, and suffer
the results, or even be broken by them.

Life is not so complex if we do not so con-
tinually persist in making it so. Supreme In-
telligence, creative Power works only through
law. Science and religion are but different ap-
proaches to our understanding of the law.
When both are real, they supplement one an-
other and their findings are identical.

The old Hebrew prophets, through the chan-
nel of the spirit, perceived and enunciated
some wonderful laws of the natural and nor-
mal life — that are now being confirmed by
well-established laws of mental and spiritual
science — and that are now producing these
identical results in the lives of great num-
bers among us today, when they said : " And
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, say-
ing, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye
turn to the right hand and when ye turn to
the left."

And again : " The Lord is with you, while
ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will
be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 13

will forsake you." " Thou wilt keep him in
perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee;
because he trusteth in thee." " The Lord in
the midst of thee is mighty." " He that dwell-
eth in the secret place of the Most High shall
abide under the shadow of the Almighty."
" Thou shalt be in league with the stones of
the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at
peace with thee." " Commit thy way unto
the Lord: trust also in him and he shall bring
it to pass." Now these formulations all mean
something of a very definite nature, or, they
mean nothing at all. If they are actual ex-
pressions of fact, they are governed by cer-
tain definite and immutable laws.

These men gave us, however, no knowledge
of the laws underlying the workings of these
inner forces and powers; they perhaps had no
such knowledge themselves. They were intui-
tive perceptions of truth on their part. The
scientific spirit of this, our age, was entirely
unknown to them. The growth of the race
in the meantime, the development of the
scientific spirit in the pursuit and the finding
of truth, makes us infinitely beyond them in
some things, while in others they were far
ahead of us. But this fact remains, and this
is the important fact: If these things were
actual facts in the lives of these early Hebrew
prophets, they are then actual facts in our

lives right now, today; or, if not actual facts,
then they are facts that still lie in the realm of
the potential, only waiting to be brought into
the realm of the actual.

These were not unusual men in the sense
that the Infinite Power, God, if you please,
could or did speak to them alone. They are
types, they are examples of how any man or
any woman, through desire and through will,
can open himself or herself to the leadings of
Divine Wisdom, and have actualised in his
or her life an ever-growing sense of Divine
Power. For truly " God is the same yester-
day, and today, and forever." His laws are
unchanging as well as immutable.

None of these men taught, then, how to
recognise the Divine Voice within, nor how
to become continually growing embodiments
of the Divine Power. They gave us perhaps,
though, all they were able to give. Then came
Jesus, the successor of this long line of illustri-
ous Hebrew prophets, with a greater aptitude
for the things of the spirit — the supreme em-
bodiment of Divine realisation and revelation.
With a greater knowledge of truth than they,
he did greater things than they.

He not only did these works, but he showed
how he did them. He not only revealed the
Way, but so earnestly and so diligently he im-
plored his hearers to follow the Way. He

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 15

makes known the secret of his insight and his
power : " The words that I speak unto you
I speak not of myself: but the Father that
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." Again,
" I can of my own self do nothing." And he
then speaks of his purpose, his aim : " I am
come that ye might have life, and that ye
might have it more abundantly." A little
later he adds : " The works that I do ye shall
do also." Now again, these things mean
something of a very definite nature, or they
mean nothing at all.

The works done, the results achieved by
Jesus' own immediate disciples and followers,
and in turn their followers, as well as in the
early church for close to two hundred years
after his time, all attest the truth of his teach-
ing and demonstrate unmistakably the results
that follow.

Down through the intervening centuries,
the teachings, the lives and the works of vari-
ous seers, sages, and mystics, within the church
and out of the church, have likewise attested
the truth of his teachings. The bulk of the
Christian world, however, since the third
century, has been so concerned with various
theories and teachings concerning Jesus, that
it has missed almost completely the real vital
and vitalising teachings of Jesus.

We have not been taught primarily to fol-

16 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

low his injunctions, and to apply the truths
that he revealed to the problems of our every-
day living. Within the last two score of years
or a little more, however, there has been a great
going back directly to the teachings of Jesus,
and a determination to prove their truth and
to make effective their assurances. Also vari-
ous laws in the realm of Mental and Spiritual
Science have become clearly established and
clearly formulated, that confirm all his funda-
mental teachings.

There are now definite and well-defined
laws in relation to thought as a force, and the
methods as to how it determines our material
and bodily conditions. There are now certain
well-defined laws pertaining to the subcon-
scious mind, its ceaseless building activities,
how it always takes its direction from the
active, thinking mind, and how through this
channel we may connect ourselves with reser-
voirs of power, so to speak, in an intelligent
and effective manner.

There are now well-understood laws under-
lying mental suggestion, whereby it can be
made a tremendous source of power in our
own lives, and can likewise be made an effec-
tive agency in arousing the motive powers of
another for his or her healing, habit-forming,
character-building. There are likewise well-
established facts not only as to the value, but

I?

the absolute need of periods of meditation and
quiet, alone with the Source of our being,
stilling the outer bodily senses, and fulfilling
the conditions whereby the Voice of the Spirit
can speak to us and through us, and the power
of the Spirit can manifest in and through us.

A nation is great only as its people are
great. Its people are great in the degree that
they strike the balance between the life of the
mind and the spirit — all the finer forces and
emotions of life — and their outer business
organisation and activities. When the latter
become excessive, when they grow at the ex-
pense of the former, then the inevitable decay
sets in, that spells the doom of that nation,
and its time is tolled off in exactly the same
manner, and under the same law, as has that
of all the other nations before it that sought
to reverse the Divine order of life.

The human soul and its welfare is the high-
est business that any state can give its atten-
tion to. To recognise or to fail to recognise
the value of the human soul in other nations,
determines its real greatness and grandeur, or
its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It
is possible for a nation, through subtle delu-
sions, to get such an attack of the big head
that it bends over backwards, and it is liable,
in this exposed position, to get a thrust in its
vitals.

i8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

To be carried too far along the road of effi-
ciency, big business, expansion, world power,
domination, at the expense of the great spir-
itual verities, the fundamental humanities of
national life, that make for the real life and
welfare of its people, and that give also its
true and just relations with other nations and
their people, is both dangerous and in the end
suicidal — it can end in nothing but loss and
eventual disaster. A silent revolution of
thought is taking place in the minds of the
people of all nations at this time, and will
continue for some years to come. A stock-tak-
ing period in which tremendous revaluations
are under way, is on. It is becoming clear-
cut and decisive.

II

SOUL, MIND, BODY— THE SUBCONSCIOUS
MIND THAT INTERRELATES THEM

There is a notable twofold characteristic of
this our age — we might almost say: of this
our generation. It is on the one hand a tre-
mendously far-reaching interest in the deeper
spiritual realities of life, in the things of the
mind and the Spirit. On the other hand,
there is a materialism that is apparent to all,
likewise far-reaching. We are witnessing the
two moving along, apparently at least, side by
side.

There are those who believe that out of the
latter the former is arising, that we are wit-
nessing another great step forward on the
part of the human race — a new era or age, so
to speak. There are many things that would
indicate this to be a fact. The fact that the
material alone does not satisfy, and that from
the very constitution of the human mind and
soul, it cannot satisfy, may be a fundamental
reason for this.

It may be also that as we are apprehending,
'9

ao HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

to a degree never equalled in the world's his-
tory, the finer forces in nature, and are using
them in a very practical and useful way in
the affairs and the activities of the daily life,
we are also and perhaps in a more pronounced
degree, realising, understanding, and using the
finer, the higher insights and forces, and there-
fore powers, of mind, of spirit, and of body.

I think there is a twofold reason for this
widespread and rapidly increasing interest.
A new psychology, or perhaps it were better
to say, some new and more fully established
laws of psychology, pertaining to the realm
of the subconscious mind, its nature, and its
peculiar activities and powers, has brought
us another agency in life of tremendous sig-
nificance and of far-reaching practical use.

Another reason is that the revelation and
the religion of Jesus the Christ is witnessing
a new birth, as it were. We are finding at
last an entirely new content in his teachings,
as well as in his life. We are dropping our
interest in those phases of a Christianity that
he probably never taught, and that we have
many reasons now to believe he never even
thought — things that were added long years
after his time.

We are conscious, however, as never before,
that that wonderful revelation, those wonder-
ful teachings, and above all that wonderful

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT ai

life, have a content that can, that does, inspire,
lift up, and make more effective, more power-
ful, more successful, and more happy, the life
of every man and every woman who will ac-
cept, who will appropriate, who will live his
teachings.

Look at it, however we will, this it is that
accounts for the vast number of earnest,
thoughtful, forward looking men and women
who are passing over, and in many cases are
passing from, traditional Christianity, and
who either of their own initiative, or under
other leadership, are going back to those sim-
ple, direct, God-impelling teachings of the
Great Master. They are finding salvation in
his teachings and his example, where they
never could find it in various phases of the tra-
ditional teachings about him.

It is interesting to realise, and it seems al-
most strange that this new finding in psy-
chology, and that this new and vital content
in Christianity, have come about at almost
identically the same time. Yet it is not
strange, for the one but serves to demonstrate
in a concrete and understandable manner the
fundamental and essential principles of the
other. Many of the Master's teachings of the
inner life, teachings of " the Kingdom," given
so far ahead of his time that the people in
general, and in many instances even his dis-

22 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ciples, were incapable of fully comprehending
and understanding them, are now being con-
firmed and further elucidated by clearly de-
fined laws of psychology.

Speculation and belief are giving way to
a greater knowledge of law. The supernatural
recedes into the background as we delve
deeper into the supernormal. The unusual
loses its miraculous element as we gain knowl-
edge of the law whereby the thing is done.
We are realising that no miracle has ever
been performed in the world's history that
was not through the understanding and the
use of Law.

Jesus did unusual things ; but he did them
because of his unusual understanding of the
law through which they could be done. He
would not have us believe otherwise. To do
so would be a distinct contradiction of the
whole tenor of his teachings and his injunc-
tions. Ye shall know the truth and the truth
shall make you free, was his own admonition.
It was the great and passionate longing of his
master heart that the people to whom he came,
grasp the interior meanings of his teachings.
How many times he felt the necessity of rebuk-
ing even his disciples for dragging his teachings
down through their material interpretations.
As some of the very truths that he taught are
now corroborated and more fully understood,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT aj

and in some cases amplified by well-established
laws of psychology, mystery recedes into the
background.

We are reconstructing a more natural, a
more sane, a more common-sense portrait
of the Master. " It is the spirit that quick-
eneth," said he ; " the flesh profiteth noth-
ing; the words that I speak unto you,
they are spirit and they are life." Shall we
recall again in this connection : " I am come
that ye might have life and that ye might
have it more abundantly"? When, therefore,
we take him at his word, and listen intently
to his words, and not so much to the words
of others about him; when we place our em-
phasis upon the fundamental spiritual truths
that he revealed and that he pleaded so
earnestly to be taken in the simple, direct way
in which he taught them, we are finding that
the religion of the Christ means a clearer and
healthier understanding of life and its prob-
lems through a greater knowledge of the ele-
mental forces and laws of life.

Ignorance enchains and enslaves. Truth —
which is but another way of saying a clear
and definite knowledge of Law, the elemental
laws of soul, of mind, and body, and of the uni-
verse about us — brings freedom. Jesus revealed
essentially a spiritual philosophy of life. His
whole revelation pertained to the essential

24 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

divinity of the human soul and the great gains
that would follow the realisation of this fact.
His whole teaching revolved continually
around his own expression, used again and
again, the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of
Heaven, and which he so distinctly stated was
an inner state or consciousness or realisation.
Something not to be found outside of oneself
but to be found only within.

We make a great error to regard man as
merely a duality — mind and body. Man is a
trinity, — soul, mind, and body, each with its
own functions, — and it is the right co-ordinat-
ing of these that makes the truly efficient and
eventually the perfect life. Anything less is
always one-sided and we may say, continually
out of gear. It is essential to a correct under-
standing, and therefore for any adequate use
of the potential powers and forces of the inner
life, to realise this.

It is the physical body that relates us to
the physical universe about us, that in which
we find ourselves in this present form of exist-
ence. But the body, wondrous as it is in its
functions and its mechanism, is not the life.
It has no life and no power in itself. It is
of the earth, earthy. Every particle of it has
come from the earth through the food we
eat in combination with the air we breathe and
the water we drink, and every part of it in

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 25

time will go back to the earth. It is the house
we inhabit while here.

We can make it a hovel or a mansion; we
can make it even a pig-sty or a temple, accord-
ing as the soul, the real self, chooses to func-
tion through it. We should make it servant,
but through ignorance of the real powers
within, we can permit it to become master.
" Know ye not," said the Great Apostle to
the Gentiles, " that your body is the temple of
the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye
have of God, and ye are not your own?"

The soul is the self, the soul made in the
image of Eternal Divine Life, which, as Jesus
said, is Spirit. The essential reality of the
soul is Spirit. Spirit — Being — is one and indi-
visible, manifesting itself, however, in individ-
ual forms in existence. Divine Being and the
human soul are therefore in essence the same,
the same in quality. Their difference, which,
however, is very great — though less in some
cases than in others — is a difference in
degree.

Divine Being is the cosmic force, the essen-
tial essence, the Life therefore of all there is
in existence. The soul is individual personal
existence. The soul while in this form of
existence manifests, functions through the
channel of a material body. It is the mind
that relates the two. It is through the medium

26 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

of the mind that the two must be coordinated.
The soul, the self, while in this form of exist-
ence, must have a body through which to
function. The body, on the other hand, to
reach and to maintain its highest state, must
be continually infused with the life force of
the soul. The life force of the soul is Spirit.
If spirit, then essentially one with Infinite
Divine Spirit, for spirit, Being, is one.

The embodied soul finds itself the tenant of
a material body in a material universe, and
according to a plan as yet, at least, beyond
our human understanding, whatever may be
our thoughts, our theories regarding it. The
•whole order of life as we see it, all the world
of Nature about us, and we must believe the
order of human life, is a gradual evolving from
the lower to the higher, from the cruder to the
finer. The purpose of life is unquestionably
unfoldment, growth, advancement — likewise
the evolving from the lower and the coarser to
the higher and the finer.

The higher insights and powers of the soul,
always potential within, become of value only
as they are realised and used. Evolution im-
plies always involution. The substance of all
we shall ever attain or be, is within us now,
waiting for realisation and thereby expression.
The soul carries its own keys to all wisdom
and to all valuable and usable power.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 27

It was that highly illumined seer, Emanuel
Swedenborg, who said : " Every created thing
is in itself inanimate and dead, but it is ani-
mated and caused to live by this, that the
Divine is in it and that it exists in and from
the Divine." Again: "The universal end of
creation is that there should be an external
union of the Creator with the created universe ;
and this would not be possible unless there
were beings in whom His Divine might be
present as if in itself; thus in whom it might
dwell and abide. To be His abode, they must
receive His love and wisdom by a power which
seems to be their own; thus, must lift them-
selves up to the Creator as if by their own
power, and unite themselves with Him. With-
out this mutual action no union would be
possible." And again: "Every one who duly
considers the matter may know that the body
does not think, because it is material, but the
soul, because it is spiritual. All the rational
life, therefore, which appears in the body be-
longs to the spirit, for the matter of the body
is annexed, and, as it were, joined to the
spirit, in order that the latter may live and
perform uses in the natural world. . . . Since
everything which lives in the body, and acts
and feels by virtue of that life, belongs to the
spirit alone, it follows that the spirit is the
real man; or, what comes to the same thing,

28 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

man himself is a spirit, in a form similar to
that of his body."

Spirit being the real man, it follows that
the great, central fact of all experience, of all
human life, is the coming into a conscious,
vital realisation of our source, of our real
being, in other words, of our essential oneness
with the spirit of Infinite Life and Power —
the source of all life and all power. We need
not look for outside help when we have within
us waiting to be realised, and thereby actual-
ised, this Divine birthright.

Browning was prophet as well as poet
when in " Paracelsus " he said :

Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may be-
lieve.

There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception — which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error : and, to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

How strangely similar in meaning it seems
to that saying of an earlier prophet, Isaiah:

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 29

" And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee,
saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when
ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn
to the left."

All great educators are men of great vision.
It was Dr. Hiram Corson who said : " It is
what man draws up from his sub-self which is
of prime importance in his true education, not
what is put into him. It is the occasional
uprising of our sub-selves that causes us, at
times, to feel that we are greater than we
know." A new psychology, spiritual science,
a more commonsense interpretation of the
great revelation of the Christ of Nazareth, all
combine to enable us to make this occasional
uprising our natural and normal state.

No man has probably influenced the educa-
tional thought and practice of the entire world
more than Friedrich Froebel. In that great book
of his, " The Education of Man," he bases his
entire system upon the following, which con-
stitutes the opening of its first chapter : " In all
things there lives and reigns an eternal law.
This all-controlling law is necessarily based
on an all-pervading, energetic, living, self-
conscious, and hence eternal, Unity. . . . This
Unity is God. All things have come from the
Divine Unity, from God, and have their origin
in the Divine Unity, in God alone. God is the
sole source of all things. All things live and

30 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

have their being in and through the Divine
Unity, in and through God. All things are
only through the divine effluence that lives in
them. The divine effluence that lives in each
thing is the essence of each thing.

" It is the destiny and life work of all things
to unfold their essence, hence their divine
being, and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself
— to reveal God in their external and transient
being. It is the special destiny and life work
of man, as an intelligent and rational being,
to become fully, vividly, conscious of this
essence of the divine effluence in him, and
therefore of God.

" The precept for life in general and for
every one is: Exhibit only tiny spiritual, thy
life, in the external, and by means of the ex-
ternal in thy actions, and observe the require-
ments of thy inner being and its nature."

Here is not only an undying basis for all
real education, but also the basis of all true
religion, as well as the basis of all ideal phi-
losophy. Yes, there could be no evolution, un-
less the essence of all to be evolved, unfolded,
were already involved in the human soul. To
follow the higher leadings of the soul, which
is so constituted that it is the inlet, and as a
consequence the outlet of Divine Spirit, Crea-
tive Energy, the real source of all wisdom
and power; to project its leadings into every

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 31

phase of material activity and endeavour, con-
stitutes the ideal life. It was Emerson who
said : " Every soul is not only the inlet, but
may become the outlet of all there is in God."
To keep this inlet open, so as not to shut out
the Divine inflow, is the secret of all higher
achievement, as well as attainment.

There is a wood separated by a single open
field from my house. In it, halfway down a
little hillside, there was some years ago a
spring. It was at one time walled up with
rather large loose stone — some three feet
across at the top. In following a vaguely de-
fined trail through the wood one day in the
early spring, a trail at one time evidently con-
siderably used, it led me to this spot. I looked
at the stone enclosure, partly moss-grown.
I wondered why, although the ground was
wet around it, there was no water in or run-
ning from what had evidently been at one
time a well-used spring.

A few days later when the early summer
work was better under way, I took an imple-
ment or two over, and half scratching, half
digging inside the little wall, I found layer
after layer of dead leaves and sediment, dead
leaves and sediment. Presently water became
evident, and a little later it began to rise within
the wall. In a short time there was nearly
three feet of water. It was cloudy, no bottom

32 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

could be seen. I sat down and waited for it to
settle.

Presently I discerned a ledge bottom and
the side against the hill was also ledge. On
this side, close to the bottom, I caught that
peculiar movement of little particles of silvery
sand, and looking more closely I could see a
cleft in the rock where the water came gush-
ing and bubbling in. Soon the entire spring
became clear as crystal, and the water finding
evidently its old outlet, made its way down
the little hillside. I was soon able to trace
and to uncover its course as it made its way
to the level place below.

As the summer went on I found myself
going to the spot again and again. Flowers
that I found in no other part of the wood,
before the autumn came were blooming along
the little watercourse. Birds in abundance
came to drink and to bathe. Several times I
have found the half-tame deer there. Twice
we were but thirty to forty paces apart.
They have watched my approach, and as I
stopped, have gone on with their drinking,
evidently unafraid — as if it were likewise their
possession. And so it is.

After spending a most valuable hour or two
in the quiet there one afternoon, I could not
help but wonder as I walked home whether
perchance the spring may not be actually

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 33

happy in being able to resume its life, to ful-
fil, so to speak, its destiny; happy also in the
service it renders flowers and the living wild
things — happy in the service it renders even
me. I am doubly happy and a hundred times
repaid in the little help I gave it. It needed
help, to enable it effectively to keep connection
with its source. As it became gradually shut
off from this, it weakened, became then stag-
nant, and finally it ceased its active life.

Containing a fundamental truth deeper per-
haps than we realise, are these words of that
gifted seer, Emanuel Swedenborg : " There is
only one Fountain of Life, and the life of
man is a stream therefrom, which if it were
not continually replenished from its source
would instantly cease to flow." And likewise
these : " Those who think in the light of in-
terior reason can see that all things are con-
nected by intermediate links with the First
Cause, and that whatever is not maintained
in that connection must cease to exist."

There is a mystic force that transcends any
powers of the intellect or of the body, that
becomes manifest and operative in the life
of man when this God-consciousness becomes
awakened and permeates his entire being.
Failure to realise and to keep in constant com-
munion with our Source is what causes fears,
forebodings, worry, inharmony, conflict, con-

34 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

flict that downs us many times in mind, in
spirit, in body — failure to follow that Light
that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world, failure to hear and to heed that Voice
of the soul, that speaks continually clearer as
we accustom ourselves to listen to and to heed
it, failure to follow those intuitions with which
the soul, every soul, is endowed, and that lead
us aright and that become clearer in their lead-
ings as we follow them. It is this guidance
and this sustaining power that all great souls
fall back upon in times of great crises.

This single stanza by Edwin Markham
voices the poet's inspiration:

At the heart of the cyclone tearing the sky,
And flinging the clouds and the towers by,

Is a place of central calm;
So, here in the roar of mortal things
I have a place where my spirit sings,

In the hollow of God's palm.

" That the Divine Life and Energy actually
lives in us," was the philosopher Fichte's reply
to the proposition — " the profoundest knowl-
edge that man can attain." And speaking of
the man to whom this becomes a real, vital,
conscious realisation, he said : " His. whole ex-
istence flows forth, softly and gently, from his
Inward Being, and issues out into Reality
without difficulty or hindrance."

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 35

There are certain faculties that we have
that are not a part of the active thinking mind ;
they seem to be no part of what we might
term our conscious intelligence. They tran-
scend any possible activities of our regular
mental processes, and they are in some
ways independent of them. Through some
avenue, suggestions, intuitions of truth, in-
tuitions of occurrences of which through the
thinking mind we could know nothing, are at
times borne in upon us; they flash into our
consciousness, as we say, quite independent of
any mental action on our part, and sometimes
when we are thinking of something quite
foreign to that which comes to, that which
" impresses " us.

This seems to indicate a source of knowl-
edge, a faculty that is distinct from, but that
acts in various ways in conjunction with, the
active thinking mind. It performs likewise
certain very definite and distinct functions in
connection with the body. It is this that is
called the subconscious mind — by some the
superconscious or the supernormal mind, by
others the subliminal self.

Just what the subconscious mind is no man
knows. It is easier to define its functions and
to describe its activities than it is to state
in exact terms what it is. It is similar in this
respect to the physical force — if it be a physical

36 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

force — electricity. It is only of late years that
we know anything of electricity at all. To-day
we know a great deal of its nature and the
laws of its action. No man living can tell
exactly what electricity is. We are neverthe-
less making wonderful practical applications
of it. We are learning more about it con-
tinually. Some day we may know what
it actually is.

The fact that the subconscious mind seems
to function in a realm apart from anything
that has to do with our conscious mental
processes, and also that it has some definite
functions as both directing and building func-
tions to perform in connection with the body,
and that it is at the same time subject to sug-
gestion and direction from the active think-
ing mind, would indicate that it may be the
true connecting link, the medium of exchange,
between the soul and the body, the connector
of the spiritual and the material so far as man
is concerned.

Ill

THE WAY MIND THROUGH THE SUBCON-
SCIOUS MIND BUILDS BODY

When one says that he numbers among his
acquaintances some who are as old at sixty as
some others are at eighty, he but gives expres-
sion to a fact that has become the common
possession of many. I have known those who
at fifty-five and sixty were to all intents and
purposes really older, more decrepit, and
rapidly growing still more decrepit both in
mind and body, than many another at seventy
and seventy-five and even at eighty.

History, then, is replete with instances,
memorable instances, of people, both men and
women, who have accomplished things at an
age — who have even begun and carried through
to successful completion things at an age that
would seem to thousands of others, in the cap-
tivity of age, with their backs to the future,
ridiculous even to think of accomplishing, much
less of beginning. On account of a certain
law that has always seemed to me to exist and
that I am now firmly convinced is very exact
in its workings, I have been interested in talk-
ing with various ones and in getting together
37

38 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

various facts relative to this great discrepancy
in the ages of these two classes of " old "
people.

Within the year I called upon a friend
whom, on account of living in a different por-
tion of the country, I hadn't seen for nearly
ten years. Conversation revealed to me the
fact that he was then in his eighty-eighth year.
I could notice scarcely a change in his appear-
ance, walk, voice, and spirit. We talked at
length upon the various, so-called, periods of
life. He told me that about the only differ-
ence that he noticed in himself as compared
with his middle life was that now when he
goes out to work in his garden, and among his
trees, bushes, and vines — and he has had many
for many years — he finds that he is quite ready
to quit and to come in at the end of about two
hours, and sometimes a little sooner, when
formerly he could work regularly without fa-
tigue for the entire half day. In other words,
he has not the same degree of endurance that
he once had.

Among others, there comes to mind in this
connection another who is a little under
seventy. It chances to be a woman. She is
bent and decrepit and growing more so by
very fixed stages each twelvemonth. I have
known her for over a dozen years. At the
time when I first knew her she was scarcely

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 39

fifty-eight, she was already bent and walked
with an uncertain, almost faltering tread. The
dominant note of her personality was then as
now, but more so now, fear for the present,
fear for the future, a dwelling continually on
her ills, her misfortunes, her symptoms, her ap-
proaching and increasing helplessness.

Such cases I have observed again and again ;
so have all who are at all interested in life and
in its forces and its problems. What is the
cause of this almost world-wide difference in
these two lives? In this case it is as clear as
day — the mental characteristics and the mental
habits of each.

In the first case, here was one who early got
a little philosophy into his life and then more
as the years passed. He early realised that in
himself his good or his ill fortune lay ; that the
mental attitude we take toward anything de-
termines to a great extent our power in connec-
tion with it, as well as its effects upon us. He
grew to love his work and he did it daily, but
never under high pressure. He was therefore
benefited by it. His face was always to the
future, even as it is to-day. This he made one
of the fundamental rules of his life. He was
helped in this, he told me in substance, by an
early faith which with the passing of the years
has ripened with him into a demonstrable con-
viction— that there is a Spirit of Infinite Life

40 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

back of all, working in love in and through the
lives of all, and that in the degree that we
realise it as the one Supreme Source of our
lives, and when through desire and will, which
is through the channel of our thoughts, we open
our lives so that this Higher Power can work
definitely in and through us, and then go
about and do our daily work without fears or
forebodings, the passing of the years sees only
the highest good entering into our lives.

In the case of the other one whom we have
mentioned, a repetition seems scarcely neces-
sary. Suffice it to say that the common expres-
sion on the part of those who know her — I have
heard it numbers of times — is : " What a bless-
ing it will be to herself and to others when she
has gone ! "

A very general rule with but few exceptions
can be laid down as follows: The body ordi-
narily looks as old as- the mind thinks and
feels.

Shakespeare anticipated by many years the
best psychology of the times when he said : " It
is the mind that makes the body rich."

It seems to me that our great problem, or
rather our chief concern, should not be so
much how to stay young in the sense of pos-
sessing all the attributes of youth, for the
passing of the years does bring changes, but
how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 41

and with undiminished vigour from youth to
middle age, and then how to carry that mid-
dle age into approaching old age, with a great
deal more of the vigour and the outlook of
middle life than ice ordinarily do.

The mental as well as the physical helps that
are now in the possession of this our genera-
tion, are capable of working a revolution in
the lives of many who are or who may become
sufficiently awake to them, so that with them
there will not be that — shall we say — immature
passing from middle life into a broken, pur-
poseless, decrepit, and sunless, and one might
almost say, soulless old age.

It seems too bad that so many among us just
at the time that they have become of most use
to themselves, their families, and to the world,
should suddenly halt and then continue in
broken health, and in so many cases lie down
and die. Increasing numbers of thinking peo-
ple the world over are now, as never before,
finding that this is not necessary, that some-
thing is at fault, that that fault is in ourselves.
If so, then reversely, the remedy lies in our-
selves, in our own hands, so to speak.

In order to aetualise and to live this better
type of life we have got to live better from
both sides, both the mental and the physical,
this with all due respect to Shakespeare and to
all modern mental scientists.

42 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

The body itself, what we term the physical
body, whatever may be the facts regarding a
finer spiritual body within it all the time giv-
ing form to and animating and directing all
its movements, is of material origin, and de-
rives its sustenance from the food we take,
from the air we breathe, the water we drink.
In this sense it is from the earth, and when
we are through with it, it will go back to the
earth.

The body, however, is not the Life; it is
merely the material agency that enables the
Life to manifest in a material universe for
a certain, though not necessarily a given, period
of time. It is the Life, or the Soul, or the
Personality that uses, and that in using shapes
and moulds, the body and that also determines
its strength or its weakness. When this is
separated from the body, the body at once be-
comes a cold, inert mass, commencing immedi-
ately to decompose into the constituent ma-
terial elements that composed it — literally go-
ing back to the earth and the elements whence
it came.

It is through the instrumentality or the
agency of thought that the Life, the Self, uses,
and manifests through, the body. Again, while
it is true that the food that is taken and as-
similated nourishes, sustains and builds the
body, it is also true that the condition and the

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 43

operation of the mind through the avenue of
thought determines into what shape or form
the body is so builded. So in this sense it is
true that mind builds body ; it is the agency, the
force that determines the shaping of the ma-
terial elements.

Here is a wall being built. Bricks are the
material used in its construction. We do not
say that the bricks are building the wall; we
say that the mason is building it, as is the case.
He is using the material that is supplied him,
in this case bricks, giving form and structure
in a definite, methodical manner. Again, back
of the mason is his mind, acting through the
channel of his thought, that is directing his
hands and all his movements. Without this
guiding, directing force no wall could take
shape, even if millions of bricks were delivered
upon the scene.

So it is with the body. We take the food,
the water, we breathe the air; but this is all
and always acted upon by a higher force. Thus
it is that mind builds body, the same as in
every department of our being it is the great
builder. Our thoughts shape and determine
our features, our walk, the posture of our
bodies, our voices; they determine the effec-
tiveness of our mental and our physical activi-
ties, as well as all our relations with and
influence or effects upon others.

44 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

You say : " I admit the operation of and even
in certain cases the power of thought, also that
at times it has an influence upon our general
feelings, but I do not admit that it can have
any direct influence upon the body." Here is
one who has allowed herself to be long given
to grief, abnormally so — notice her lowered
physical condition, her lack of vitality. The
New York papers within the past twelve
months recorded the case of a young lady in
New Jersey who, from constant grieving over
the death of her mother, died, fell dead, within
a week.

A man is handed a telegram. He is eating
and enjoying his dinner. He reads the con-
tents of the message. Almost immediately
afterward, his body is a-tremble, his face either
reddens or grows " ashy white," his appetite is
gone ; such is the effect of the mind upon the
stomach that it literally refuses the food; if
forced upon it, it may reject it entirely.

A message is delivered to a lady. She is in
a genial, happy mood. Her face whitens; she
trembles and her body falls to the ground in
a faint, temporarily helpless, apparently life-
less. Such are the intimate relations between
the mind and the body. Raise a cry of fire in
a crowded theatre. It may be a false alarm.
There are among the audience those who be-
come seemingly palsied, powerless to move. It

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 45

is the state of the mind, and within several
seconds, that has determined the state of these
bodies. Such are examples of the wonderfully
quick influence of the mind on the body.

Great stress, or anxiety, or fear, may in two
weeks' or even in two days' time so work its
ravages that the person looks ten years or even
twenty years older. A person has been long
given to worry, or perhaps to worry in extreme
form though not so long — a well-defined case
of indigestion and general stomach trouble,
with a generally lowered and sluggish vitality,
has become pronounced and fixed.

Any type of thought that prevails in our
mental lives will in time produce its corre-
spondences in our physical lives. As we under-
stand better these laws of correspondences, we
will be more careful as to the types of thoughts
and emotions we consciously, or unwittingly,
entertain and live with. The great bulk of all
diseases, we will find, as we are continually
finding more and more, are in the mind before
being in the body, or are generated in the body
through certain states and conditions of mind.

The present state and condition of the body
have been produced primarily by the thoughts
that have been taken by the conscious mind
into the subconscious, that is so intimately
related to and that directs all the subconscious
and involuntary functions of the body. Says

46 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

one: It may be true that the mind has had
certain effects upon the body; but to be able
consciously to affect the body through the mind
is impossible and even unthinkable, for the
body is a solid, fixed, material form.

We must get over the idea, as we quickly
will, if we study into the matter, that the
body, in fact anything that we call material
and solid, is really solid. Even in the case of a
piece of material as " solid " as a bar of steel,
the atoms forming the molecules are in con-
tinual action each in conjunction with its
neighbour. In the last analysis the body is
composed of cells — cells of bone, vital organ,
flesh, sinew. In the body the cells are con-
tinually changing, forming and reforming.
Death would quickly take place were this not
true. Nature is giving us a new body prac-
tically every year.

There are very few elements, cells, in the
body of today that were there a year ago.
The rapidity with which a cut or wound on
the body is replaced by healthy tissue, the
rapidity with which it heals, is an illustration
of this. One " touches " himself in shaving.
In a week, sometimes in less than a week, if the
blood and the cell structure be particularly
healthy, there is no trace of the cut, the forma-
tion of new cell tissue has completely re-
paired it. Through the formation of new

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 47

cell structure the life-force within, acting
through the blood, is able to rebuild and
repair, if not too much interfered with, very
rapidly. The reason, we may say almost the
sole reason, that surgery has made such great
advances during the past few years, so much
greater correspondingly than medicine, is on
account of a knowledge of the importance of
and the use of antiseptics — keeping the wound
clean and entirely free from all extraneous
matter.

So then, the greater portion of the body is
really new, therefore young, in that it is almost
entirely this year's growth. Newness of form
is continually being produced in the body by
virtue of this process of perpetual renewal that
is continually going on, and the new cells and
tissues are just as new as is the new leaf that
comes forth in the springtime to take the place
of and to perform the same functions as the
one that was thrown off by the tree last
autumn.

The skin renews itself through the casting off
of used cells (those that have already per-
formed their functions) most rapidly, taking
but a few weeks. The muscles, the vital or-
gans, the entire arterial system, the brain and
the nervous system all take longer, but all are
practically renewed within a year, some in
much less time. Then comes the bony struc-

48 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ture, taking the longest, varying, we are told,
from seven and eight months to a year, in
unusual cases fourteen months and longer.

It is, then, through this process of cell forma-
tion that the physical body has been built up,
and through the same process that it is con-
tinually renewing itself. It is not therefore
at any time or at any age a solid fixed mass or
material, but a structure in a continually
changing fluid form. It is therefore easy to
see how we have it in our power, when we are
once awake to the relations between the con-
scious mind and the subconscious — and it in
turn in its relations to the various involuntary
and vital functions of the body — to determine
to a great extent how the body shall be built
or how it shall be rebuilt.

Mentally to live in any state or attitude of
mind is to take that state or condition into the
subconscious. The subconscious mind does and
always will produce in the body after its own
kind. It is through this law that we external-
ise and become in body what we live in our
minds. If we have predominating visions of
and harbour thoughts of old age and weakness,
this state, with all its attendant circumstances,
will become externalised in our bodies far more
quickly than if we entertain thoughts and
visions of a different type. Said Archdeacon
Wilberforce in a notable address in Westmin-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 49

ster Abbey some time ago : " The recent re-
searches of scientific men, endorsed by experi-
ments in the Salpetriere in Paris, have drawn
attention to the intensely creative power of
suggestions made by the conscious mind to the
subconscious mind."

IV

THE POWERFUL AID OF THE MIND IN

REBUILDING BODY— HOW BODY

HELPS MIND

" The body looks," some one has said, " as
old as the mind feels." By virtue of a great
mental law and at the same time chemical
law we are well within the realm of truth
when we say: The body ordinarily is as old
as the mind feels.

Every living organism is continually going
through two processes : it is continually dying,
and continually being renewed through the
operation and the power of the Life Force
within it. In the human body it is through the
instrumentality of the cell that this process is
going on. The cell is the ultimate constituent
in the formation and in the life of tissue, fibre,
tendon, bone, muscle, brain, nerve system,
vital organ. It is the instrumentality that Na-
ture, as we say, uses to do her work.

The cell is formed; it does its work; it
serves its purpose and dies ; and all the while
new cells are being formed to take its place.
This process of new cell formation is going on
in the body of each of us much more rapidly

So

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 51

and uniformly than we think. Science has
demonstrated the fact that there are very few
cells in the body today that were there twelve
months ago. The form of the body remains
practically the same; but its constituent ele-
ments are in a constant state of change. The
body, therefore, is continually changing; it is
never in a fixed state in the sense of being a
solid, but is always in a changing, fluid state.
It is being continually remade.

It is the Life, or the Life Force within, act-
ing under the direction and guidance of the
subconscious or subjective mind that is the
agency through which this continually new cell-
formation process is going on. The subcon-
scious mind is, nevertheless, always subject to
suggestions and impressions that are conveyed
to it by the conscious or sense mind ; and here
lies the great fact, the one all-important fact
for us so far as desirable or undesirable, so
far as healthy or unhealthy, so far as normal or
aging body-building is concerned.

That we have it in our power to determine
our physical and bodily conditions to a far
greater extent than we do is an undeniable fact.
That we have it in our power to determine and
to dictate the conditions of " old age " to a
marvellous degree is also an undeniable fact —
if we are sufficiently keen and sufficiently
awake to begin early enough.

52 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

If any arbitrary divisions of the various
periods of life were allowable, I should make
the enumeration as follows : Youth, barring the
period of babyhood, to forty-five; middle age,
forty-five to sixty; approaching age, sixty to
seventy-five.; old age, seventy-five to ninety-
five and a hundred.

That great army of people who " age " long
before their time, that likewise great army of
both men and women who along about middle
age, say from forty-five to sixty, break and, as
we say, all of a sudden go to pieces, and many
die, just at the period when they should be in
the prime of life, in the full vigour of manhood
and womanhood and of greatest value to them-
selves, to their families, and to the world, is
something that is contrary to nature, and is
one of the pitiable conditions of our time. A
greater knowledge, a little foresight, a little
care in time could prevent this in the great
majority of cases, in ninety cases out of every
hundred, without question.

Abounding health and strength — wholeness
— is the natural law of the body. The Life
Force of the body, acting always under the
direction of the subconscious mind, will build,
and always does build, healthily and normally,
unless too much interfered with. It is this
that determines the type of the cell structure
that is continually being built into the body

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 53

from the available portions of the food that
we take to give nourishment to the body. It
is affected for good or for bad, helped or hin-
dered, in its operation by the type of con-
scious thought that is directed toward it, and
that it is always influenced by.

Of great suggestive value is the following
by an able writer and practitioner :

" God has managed, and perpetually man-
ages, to insert into our nature a tendency
toward health, and against the unnatural con-
dition which we call disease. When our flesh
receives a wound, a strange nursing and heal-
ing process is immediately commenced to repair
the injury. So in all diseases, organic or func-
tional, this mysterious healing power sets itself
to work at once to triumph over the morbid
condition. . . . Cannot this healing process be
greatly accelerated by a voluntary and con-
scious action of the mind, assisted, if need be,
by some other person? I unhesitatingly affirm,
from experience and observation, that it can.
By some volitional, mental effort and process
of thought, this sanative colatus, or healing
power which God has given to our physiologi-
cal organism, may be greatly quickened and
intensified in its action upon the body. Here
is the secret philosophy of the cures effected
by Jesus Christ. . . . There is a law of the
action of mind on the body that is no more an

54 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

impenetrable mystery than the law of gravita*
tion. It can be understood and acted upon
in the cure of disease as well as any other law
of nature."

If, then, it be possible through this process
to change physical conditions in the body even
after they have taken form and have become
fixed, as we say, isn't it possible even more
easily to determine the type of cell structure
that is grown in the first place ?

The ablest rrfinds in the world have thought
and are thinking that if we could find a way
of preventing the hardening of the cells of the
system, producing in turn hardened arteries
and what is meant by the general term " ossi-
fication," that the process of aging, growing
old, could be greatly retarded, and that the
condition of perpetual youth that we seem to
catch glimpses of in rare individuals here and
there could be made a more common occur-
rence than we find it to-day.

The cause of ossification is partly mental,
partly physical, and in connection with them
both are hereditary influences and conditions
that have to be taken into consideration.

Shall we look for a moment to the first? The
food that is taken into the system, or the avail-
able portions of the food, is the building ma-
terial ; but the mind is always the builder.

There are, then, two realms of mind, the

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 55

conscious and the subconscious. Another way
of expressing it would be to say that mind
functions through two avenues — the avenue of
the conscious and the avenue of the subcon-
scious. The conscious is the thinking mind;
the subconscious is the doing mind. The con-
scious is the sense mind, it comes in contact
with and is acted upon through the avenue of
the five senses. The subconscious is that
quiet, finer, all-permeating inner mind or force
that guides all the inner functions, the life
functions of the body, and that watches over
and keeps them going even when we are utterly
unconscious in sleep. The conscious suggests
and gives directions ; the subconscious receives
and carries into operation the suggestions that
are received.

The thoughts, ideas, and even beliefs and
emotions of the conscious mind are the seeds
that are taken in by the subconscious and that
in this great realm of causation will germinate
and produce of their own kind. The chemical
activities that go on in the process of cell
formation in the body are all under the in-
fluence, the domination of this great all-per-
meating subconscious, or subjective realm
within us.

In that able work, " The Laws of Psychic
Phenomena," Dr. Thomas J. Hudson lays down
this proposition : " That the subjective mind is

56 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

constantly amenable to control by suggestion."
It is easy, when we once understand and appre-
ciate this great fact, to see how the body builds,
or rather is built, for health and strength, or
for disease and weakness; for youth and
vigour, or for premature ossification and age.
It is easy, then, to see how we can have a hand
in, in brief can have the controlling hand in,
building either the one or the other.

It is in the province of the intelligent man or
woman to take hold of the wheel, so to speak,
and to determine as an intelligent human being
should, what condition or conditions shall be
given birth and form to and be externalised in
the body.

A noted thinker and writer has said : " What-
ever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps
most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the
continual thought or imagining must at last
take form and shape in the world of seen and
tangible things."

And now, to be as concrete as possible, we
have these facts: The body is continually
changing in that it is continually throwing out
and off, used cells, and continually building
new cells to take their places. This process,
as well as all the inner functions of the body,
is governed and guarded by the subconscious
realm of our being. The subconscious can do
and does do whatever it is actually directed to

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 57

do by the conscious, thinking mind. " We
must be careful on what we allow our minds
to dwell," said Sir John Lubbock, " the soul
is dyed by its thoughts."

If we believe ourselves subject to weakness,
decay, infirmity, when we should be " whole,"
the subconscious mind seizes upon the pattern
that is sent it and builds cell structure accord-
ingly. This is one great reason why one who
is, as we say, chronically thinking and talking
of his ailments and symptoms, who is com-
plaining and fearing, is never well.

To see one's self, to believe, and therefore
to picture one's self in mind as strong, healthy,
active, well, is to furnish a pattern, is to give
suggestion and therefore direction to the sub-
conscious so that it will build cell tissue hav-
ing the stamp and the force of healthy, vital,
active life, which in turn means abounding
health and strength.

So, likewise, at about the time that " old
age " is supposed ordinarily to begin, when it is
believed in and looked for by those about us
and those who act in accordance with this
thought, if we fall into this same mental drift,
we furnish the subconscious the pattern that it
will inevitably build bodily conditions in ac-
cordance with. We will then find the ordi-
narily understood marks and conditions of old
age creeping upon us, and we will become sub-

58 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ject to their influences in every department of
our being. Whatever is thus pictured in the
mind and lived in, the Life Force will produce.

To remain young in mind, in spirit, in feel-
ing, is to remain young in body. Growing old
at the period or age at which so many grow old,
is to a great extent a matter of habit.

To think health and strength, to see our-
selves continually growing in this condition,
is to set into operation the subtlest dynamic
force for the externalisation of these conditions
in the body that can be even conceived of. If
one's bodily condition, through abnormal, false
mental and emotional habits, has become ab-
normal and diseased, this same attitude of
mind, of spirit, of imagery, is to set into opera-
tion a subtle and powerful corrective agency
that, if persisted in, will inevitably tend to
bring normal, healthy conditions to the front
again.

True, if these abnormal, diseased conditions
have been helped on or have been induced by
wrong physical habits, by the violation of
physical laws, this violation must cease. But
combine the two, and then give the body the
care that it requires in a moderate amount of
simple, wholesome food, regular cleansing to
assist it in the elimination of impurities and of
used cell structure that is being regularly cast
off, an abundance of pure air and of moderate

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 59

exercise, and a change amounting almost to
a miracle can be wrought — it may be, indeed,
what many people of olden time would have
termed a miracle.

The mind thus becomes " a silent, transform-
ing, sanative energy " of great potency and
power. That it can be so used is attested by
the fact of the large numbers, and the rapidly
increasing numbers, all about us who are so
using it. This is what many people all over
our country are doing to-day, with the results
that, by a great elemental law — Divine Law if
you choose — many are curing themselves of
various diseases, many are exchanging weak-
ness and impotence for strength and power,
many are ceasing, comparatively speaking, are
politely refusing, to grow old.

Thought is a force, subtle and powerful, and
it tends inevitably to produce of its kind.

In forestalling " old age," at least old age
of the decrepit type, it is the period of middle
life where the greatest care is to be employed.
If, at about the time " old age " is supposed
ordinarily to begin, the " turn ** at middle life
or a little later, we would stop to consider
what this period really means, that it means
with both men and women a period of life
where some simple readjustments are to be
made, a period of a little rest, a little letting
up, a temporary getting back to the playtime

5o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

of earlier years and a bringing of these char-
acteristics back into life again, then a complete
letting-up would not be demanded by nature
a little later, as it is demanded in such a
lamentably large number of cases at the
present time.

So in a definite, deliberate way, youth should
be blended into the middle life, and the re-
sultant should be a force that will stretch mid-
dle life for an indefinite period into the future.

And what an opportunity is here for mothers,
at about the time that the children have grown,
and some or all even have " flown " ! Of
course, Mother shouldn't go and get foolish,
she shouldn't go cavorting around in a sixteen-
year-old hat, when the hat of the thirty-five-
year-old would undoubtedly suit her better;
but she should rejoice that the golden period
of life is still before her. Now she has leisure
to do many of those things that she has so
long wanted to do.

The world's rich field of literature is before
her ; the line of study or work she has longed to
pursue, she bringing to it a better equipped
mind and experience than she has ever had be-
fore. There is also an interest in the life and
welfare of her community, in civic, public wel-
fare lines that the present and the quick-
coming time before us along women's enfran-
chisement lines, along women's commonsense

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 61

equality lines, is making her a responsible and
full sharer in. And how much more valuable
she makes herself, also, to her children, as
well as to her community, inspiring in them
greater confidence, respect, and admiration
than if she allows herself to be pushed into the
background by her own weak and false
thoughts of herself, or by the equally foolish
thoughts of her children in that she is now, or
is at any time, to become a back number.

Life, as long as we are here, should mean
continuous unfoldment, advancement, and this
is undoubtedly the purpose of life; but age-
producing forces and agencies mean deteriora-
tion, as opposed to growth and unfoldment.
They ossify, weaken, stiffen, deaden, both men-
tally and physically. For him or her who
yearns to stay young, the coming of the years
does not mean or bring abandonment of hope
or of happiness or of activity. It means com-
parative vigour combined with continually
larger experience, and therefore even more
usefulness, and hence pleasure and happiness.

Praise also to those who do not allow any
one or any number of occurrences in life to
sour their nature, rob them of their faith, or
cripple their energies for the enjoyment of the
fullest in life while here. It's those people
who never allow themselves in spirit to be
downed, no matter what their individual prob-

62 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

lems, surroundings, or conditions may be, but
who chronically bob up serenely who, after all,
are the masters of life,, and who are likewise
the strength-givers and the helpers of others.
There are multitudes in the world today, there
are readers of this volume, who could add a
dozen or a score of years — teeming, healthy
years — to their lives by a process of self-exami-
nation, a mental housecleaning, and a re-
constructed, positive, commanding type of
thought.

Tennyson was prophet when he sang:

Cleave then to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith !
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of " Yes " and

" No,"
She sees the Best that glimmers through the

Worst,

She feels the sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer through the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed

" mirage."

V

THOUGHT AS A FORCE IN DAILY LIVING

Some years ago an experience was told to
me that has been the cause of many interest-
ing observations since. It was related by a
man living in one of our noted university
towns in the Middle West. He was a well-
known lecture manager, having had charge of
many lecture tours for John B. Gough, Henry
Ward Beecher, and others of like standing.
He himself was a man of splendid character,
was of a sensitive organism, as we say, and
had always taken considerable interest in the
powers and forces pertaining to the inner life.

As a young man he had left home, and dur-
ing a portion of his first year away he had
found employment on a Mississippi steamboat.
One day in going down the river, while he
was crossing the deck, a sudden stinging sen-
sation seized him in the head, and instantly
vivid thoughts of his mother, back at the old
home, flashed into his mind. This was fol-
lowed by a feeling of depression during the
remainder of the day. The occurrence was so
63

64 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

unusual and the impression of it was so strong
that he made an account of it in his diary.

Some time later, on returning home, he was
met in the yard by his mother. She was wear-
ing a thin cap on her head which he had never
seen her wear before. He remarked in regard
to it. She raised the cap and doing so re-
vealed the remains of a long ugly gash on the
side of her head. She then said that some
months before, naming the time, she had gone
into the back yard and had picked up a heavy
crooked stick having a sharp end, to throw
it out of the way, and in throwing it, it had
struck a wire clothesline immediately above
her head and had rebounded with such force
that it had given her the deep scalp wound
of which she was speaking. On unpacking his
bag he looked into his diary and found that
the time she had mentioned corresponded ex-
actly with the strange and unusual occurrence
to himself as they were floating down the
Mississippi.

The mother and son were very near one to
the other, close in their sympathies, and there
can be but little doubt that the thoughts of
the mother as she was struck went out, and
perhaps went strongly out, to her boy who was
now away from home. He, being sensitively
organised and intimately related to her in
thought, and alone at the time, undoubtedly

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 65

got, if not her thought, at least the effects of
her thought, as it went out to him under these
peculiar and tense conditions.

There are scores if not hundreds of occur-
rences of a more or less similar nature that
have occurred in the lives of others, many of
them well authenticated. How many of us,
even, have had the experience of suddenly
thinking of a friend of whom we have not
thought for weeks or months, and then entirely
unexpectedly meeting or hearing from this
same friend. How many have had the experi-
ence of writing a friend, one who has not been
written to or heard from for a long time, and
within a day or two getting a letter from that,
friend — the letters " crossing," as we are ac-
customed to say. There are many other ex-
periences or facts of a similar nature, and many
of them exceedingly interesting, that could be
related did space permit. These all indicate
to me that thoughts are not mere indefinite
things but that thoughts are forces, that they
go out, and that every distinct, clear-cut
thought has, or may have, an influence of
some type.

Thought transference, which is now unques-
tionably an established fact, notwithstanding
much chicanery that is still to be found in con-
nection with it, is undoubtedly to be explained
through the fact that thoughts are forces. A

66 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

positive mind through practice, at first with
very simple beginnings, gives form to a
thought that another mind open and receptive
to it — and sufficiently attuned to the other
mind — is able to receive.

Wireless telegraphy, as a science, has been
known but a comparatively short time. The
laws underlying it have been in the universe
perhaps, or undoubtedly, always. It is only
lately that the mind of man has been able to
apprehend them, and has been able to con-
struct instruments in accordance with these
laws. We are now able, through a knowledge
of the laws of vibration and by using the right
sending and receiving instruments, to send
actual messages many hundreds of miles di-
rectly through the ether and without the more
clumsy accessories of poles and wires. This
much of it we know — there is perhaps even
more yet to be known.

We may find, as I am inclined to think we
shall find, that thought is a form of vibration.
When a thought is born in the brain, it goes
out just as a sound wave goes out, and trans-
mits itself through the ether, making its im-
pressions upon other minds that are in a suffi-
ciently sensitive state to receive it; this in
addition to the effects that various types of
thoughts have upon the various bodily func-
tions of the one with whom they take origin.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 67

We are, by virtue of the laws of evolution,
constantly apprehending the finer forces of
nature — the tallow-dip, the candle, the oil
lamp, years later a more refined type of oil,
gas, electricity, the latest tungsten lights,
radium — and we may be still only at the begin-
nings. Our finest electric lights of today may
seem — will seem — crude and the quality of
their light even more crude, twenty years
hence, even less. Many other examples of our
gradual passing from the coarser to the finer
in connection with the laws and forces of na-
ture occur readily to the minds of us all.

The present great interest on the part of
thinking men and women everywhere, in addi-
tion to the more particular studies, experi-
ments, and observations of men such as Sir
Oliver Lodge, Sir William Ramsay, and others,
in the powers and forces pertaining to the
inner life is an indication that we have reached
a time when we are making great strides
along these lines. Some of our greatest scien-
tists are thinking that we are on the eve of
some almost startling glimpses into these finer
realms. My own belief is that we are like-
wise on the eve of apprehending the more
precise nature of thought as a force, the
methods of its workings, and the law under-
lying its more intimate and everyday uses.

Of one thing we can rest assured; nothing

68 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

in the universe, nothing in connection with
human life is outside of the Realm of Law.
The elemental law of Cause and Effect is ab-
solute in its workings. One of the great laws
pertaining to human life is: As is the inner,
so always and inevitably is the outer — Cause,
Effect. Our thoughts and emotions are the
silent, subtle forces that are constantly exter-
nalising themselves in kindred forms in our
outward material world. Like creates like,
and like attracts like. As is our prevailing
type of thought, so is our prevailing type and
our condition of life.

The type of thought we entertain has its ef-
fect upon our energies and to a great extent
upon our bodily conditions and states. Strong,
clear-cut, positive, hopeful thought has a
stimulating and life-giving effect upon one's
outlook, energies, and activities; and upon all
bodily functions and powers. A falling state
of the mind induces a chronically gloomy out-
look and produces inevitably a falling condi-
tion of the body. The mind grows, moreover,
into the likeness of the thoughts one most
habitually entertains and lives with. Every
thought reproduces of its kind.

Says an authoritative writer in dealing more
particularly with the effects of certain types of
thoughts and emotions upon bodily conditions :
" Out of our own experience we know that

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 69

anger, fear, worry, hate, revenge, avarice, grief,
in fact all negative and low emotions, produce
weakness and disturbance not only in the mind
but in the body as well. It has been proved
that they actually generate poisons in the body,
they depress the circulation; they change the
quality of the blood, making it less vital ; they
affect the great nerve centres and thus par-
tially paralyse the very seat of the bodily ac-
tivities. On the other hand, faith, hope, love,
forgiveness, joy, and peace, all such emotions
are positive and uplifting, and so act on the
body as to restore and maintain harmony and
actually to stimulate the circulation and nutri-
tion."

The one who does not allow himself to be in-
fluenced or controlled by fears or forebodings
is the one who ordinarily does not yield to
discouragements. He it is who is using the
positive, success-bringing types of thought that
are continually working for him for the accom-
plishment of his ends. The things that he sees
in the ideal, his strong, positive, and therefore
creative type of thought, is continually help-
ing to actualise in the realm of the real.

We sometimes speak lightly of ideas, but this
world would be indeed a sorry place in which
to live were it not for ideas — and were it not
for ideals. Every piece of mechanism that has
ever been built, if we trace back far enough,

70 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

was first merely an idea in some man's or /
woman's mind. Every structure or edifice that
has ever been reared had form first in this
same immaterial realm. So every great under-
taking of whatever nature had its inception, its
origin, in the realm of the immaterial — at least
as we at present call it — before it was em-
bodied and stood forth in material form.

It is well, then, that we have our ideas and
our ideals. It is well, even, to build castles in
the air, if we follow these up and give them
material clothing or structure, so that they
become castles on the ground. Occasionally it
is true that these may shrink or, rather, may
change their form and become cabins; but
many times we find that an expanded vision
and an expanded experience lead us to a knowl-
edge of the fact that, so far as happiness and
satisfaction are concerned, the contents of a
cabin may outweigh many times those of the
castle.

Successful men and women are almost in-
variably those possessing to a supreme degree
the element of faith. Faith, absolute, uncon-
querable faith, is one of the essential con-
comitants, therefore one of the great secrets of
success. We must realise, and especially valu-
able is it for young men and women to realise,
that one carries his success or his failure with
him, that it does not depend upon outside

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 71

conditions. There are some that no circum-
stances or combinations of circumstances can
thwart or keep down. Let circumstance seem
to thwart or circumvent them in one direction,
and almost instantly they are going forward
along another direction. Circumstance is kept
busy keeping up with them. When she meets
such, after a few trials, she apparently de-
cides to give up and turn her attention to those
of the less positive, the less forceful, therefore
the less determined, types of mind and of life.
Circumstance has received some hard knocks
from men and women of this type. She has
grown naturally timid and will always back
down whenever she recognises a mind, and
therefore a life, of sufficient force.

To make the best of whatever present con-
ditions are, to form and clearly to see one's
ideal, though it may seem far distant and al-
most impossible, to believe in it, and to believe
in one's ability to actualise it — this is the first
essential. Not, then, to sit and idly fold the
hands, expecting it to actualise itself, but to
take hold of the first thing that offers itself
to do, — that lies sufficiently along the way, — to
do this faithfully, believing, knowing, that it
is but the step that will lead to the next best
thing, and this to the next; this is the second
and the completing stage of all accomplish-
ment.

72 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

We speak of fate many times as if it were
something foreign to or outside of ourselves,
forgetting that fate awaits always our own
conditions. A man decides his own fate
through the types of thoughts he entertains
and gives a dominating influence in his life.
He sits at the helm of his thought world and,
guiding, decides his own fate, or, through nega-
tive, vacillating, and therefore weakening
thought, he drifts, and fate decides him. Fate
is not something that takes form and domi-
nates us irrespective of any say on our own
part. Through a knowledge and an intelli-
gent and determined use of the silent but ever-
working power of thought we either condition
circumstances, or, lacking this knowledge or
failing to apply it, we accept the role of a
conditioned circumstance. It is a help some-
times to realise and to voice with Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

The thoughts that we entertain not only de-
termine the conditions of our own immediate
lives, but they influence, perhaps in a much
more subtle manner than most of us realise,
our relations with and our influence upon those

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 73

with whom we associate or even come into
contact. All are influenced, even though un-
consciously, by them.

Thoughts of good will, sympathy, magna-
nimity, good cheer — in brief, all thoughts
emanating from a spirit of love — are felt in
their positive, warming, and stimulating influ-
ences by others ; they inspire in turn the same
types of thoughts and feelings in them, and
they come back to us laden with their en-
nobling, stimulating, pleasure-bringing influ-
ences.

Thoughts of envy, or malice, or hatred, or ill
will are likewise felt by others. They are in-
fluenced adversely by them. They inspire
either the same types of thoughts and emotions
in them; or they produce in them a certain
type of antagonistic feeling that has the tend-
ency to neutralise and, if continued for a
sufficient length of time, deaden sympathy and
thereby all friendly relations.

We have heard much of " personal mag-
netism." Careful analysis will, I think, reveal
the fact that the one who has to any marked
degree the element of personal magnetism is
one of the large-hearted, magnanimous, cheer-
bringing, unself-centred types, whose positive
thought forces are being continually felt by
others, and are continually inspiring and call-
ing forth from others these same splendid at-

74 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

tributes. I have yet to find any one, man or
woman, of the opposite habits and, therefore,
trend of mind and heart who has had or who
has even to the slightest perceptible degree the
quality that we ordinarily think of when we
use the term " personal magnetism."

If one would have friends he or she must be
a friend, must radiate habitually friendly, help-
ful thoughts, good will, love. The one who
doesn't cultivate the hopeful, cheerful, uncom-
plaining, good-will attitude toward life and
toward others becomes a drag, making life
harder for others as well as for one's self.

Ordinarily we find in people the qualities we
are mostly looking for, or the qualities that
our own prevailing characteristics call forth.
The larger the nature, the less critical and
cynical it is, the more it is given to looking for
the best and the highest in others, and the less,
therefore, is it given to gossip.

It was Jeremy Bentham who said : " In order
to love mankind, we must not expect too much
of them." And Goethe had a still deeper
vision when he said : " Who is the happiest
of men? He who values the merits of others,
and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though
it were his own."

The chief characteristic of the gossip is that
he or she prefers to live in the low-lying
miasmic strata of life, revelling in the nega-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 75

tives of life and taking joy in finding and ped-
dling about the findings that he or she natu-
rally makes there. The larger natures see the
good and sympathise with the weaknesses and
the frailties of others. They realise also that it
is so consummately inconsistent — many times
even humorously inconsistent — for one also
with weaknesses, frailties, and faults, though
perhaps of a little different character, to sit
in judgment of another. Gossip concerning
the errors or shortcomings of another is judg-
ing another. The one who is himself perfect is
the one who has the right to judge another.
By a strange law, however, though by a natural
law, we find, as we understand life in its funda-
mentals better, such a person is seldom if ever
given to judging, much less to gossip.

Life becomes rich and expansive through
sympathy, good will, and good cheer; not
through cynicism or criticism. That splendid
little poem of but a single stanza by Edwin
Markham, " Outwitted," points after all to one
of life's fundamentals:

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,
But Love and I had the wit to win :
We drew a circle that took him in!

VI

JESUS THE SUPREME EXPONENT OF THE

INNER FORCES AND POWERS: HIS

PEOPLE'S RELIGION AND THEIR

CONDITION

In order to have any true or adequate under-
standing of what the real revelation and teach-
ings of Jesus were, two things must be borne
in mind. It is necessary in the first place,
not only to have a knowledge of, but always
to bear in mind the method, the medium
through which the account of his life has come
down to us. Again, before the real content
and significance of Jesus' revelation and teach-
ings can be intelligently understood, it is nec-
essary that we have a knowledge of the con-
ditions of the time in which he lived and of
the people to whom he spoke, to whom his
revelation was made.

To any one who has even a rudimentary
knowledge of the former, it becomes apparent
at once that no single saying or statement of
Jesus can be taken to indicate either his rev-
elation or his purpose. These must be made
to depend upon not any single statement or
76

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 77

saying of his own, much less anything re-
ported about him by another; but it must be
made to depend rather upon the whole tenor
of his teachings.

Jesus put nothing in writing. There was
no one immediately at hand to make a record
of any of his teachings or any of his acts.
It is now well known that no one of the gos-
pels was written by an immediate hearer, by
an eye-witness.

The Gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel, or
in other words the one written nearest to
Jesus' time, was written some forty years
after he had finished his work. Matthew and
Luke, taken to a great extent from the Gospel
of Mark, supplemented by one or two addi-
tional sources, were written many years after.
The Gospel of John was not written until after
the beginning of the second century after
Christ. These four sets of chronicles, called
the Gospels, written independently one of
another, were then collected many years after
their authors were dead, and still a great deal
later were brought together into a single book.

The following concise statement by Pro-
fessor Henry Drummond throws much light
upon the way the New Testament portions of
our Bible took form : " The Bible is not a
book; it is a library. It consists of sixty-six
books. It is a great convenience, but in some

78 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

respects a great misfortune, that these books
have always been bound up together and given
out as one book to the world, when they are
not; because that has led to endless mistakes
in theology and practical life. These books,
which make up this library, written at inter-
vals of hundreds of years, were collected after
the last of the writers was dead — long after —
by human hands. Where were the books?
Take the New Testament. There were four
lives of Christ. One was in Rome; one was
in Southern Italy; one was in Palestine; one
in Asia Minor. There were twenty-one letters.
Five were in Greece and Macedonia; five in
Asia; one in Rome. The rest were in the
pockets of private individuals. Theophilus
had Acts. They were collected undesignedly.
In the third century the New Testament con-
sisted of the following books: The four Gos-
pels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, I John, I
Peter; and, in addition, the Epistles of Bar-
nabas and Hennas. This was not called the
New Testament, but the Christian Library.
Then these last books were discarded. They
ceased to be regarded as upon the same level
as the others. In the fourth century the canon
was closed — that is to say, a list was made up
of the books which were to be regarded as
canonical. And then long after that they
were stitched together and made up into one

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 79

book — hundreds of years after that. Who made
up the complete list? It was never formally
made up. The bishops of the different
churches would draw up a list each of the books
that they thought ought to be put into this
Testament. The churches also would give
their opinions. Sometimes councils would
meet and talk it over — discuss it. Scholars
like Jerome would investigate the authenticity
of the different documents, and there came to
be a general consensus of the churches on the
matter."

Jesus spoke in his own native language, the
Aramaic. His sayings were then rendered
into Greek, and, as is well known by all well-
versed Biblical scholars, it was not an espe-
cially high order of Greek. The New Testa-
ment scriptures including the four gospels,
were then many hundreds of years afterwards
translated from the Greek into our modern
languages — English, German, French, Swed-
ish, or whatever the language of the particu-
lar translation may be. Those who know
anything of the matter of translation know
how difficult it is to render the exact meanings
of any statements or writing into another lan-
guage. The rendering of a single word may
sometimes mean, or rather may make a great
difference in the thought of the one giving
the utterance. How much greater is this lia-

8o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

bility when the thing thus rendered is twice
removed from its original source and form!

The original manuscripts had no punctua-
tion and no verse divisions; these were all
arbitrarily supplied by the translators later on.
It is also a well-established fact on the part
of leading Biblical scholars that through the
centuries there have been various interpola-
tions in the New Testament scriptures, both
by way of omissions and additions.

Reference is made to these various facts in
connection with the sayings and the teachings
of Jesus and the methods and the media
through which they have come down to us,
to show how impossible it would be to base
Jesus' revelation or purpose upon any single
utterance made or purported to be made by
him — to indicate, in other words, that to get
at his real message, his real teachings, and his
real purpose, we must find the binding thread
if possible, the reiterated statement, the re-
peated purpose that makes them throb with
the living element.

Again, no intelligent understanding of Jesus'
revelation or ministry can be had without a
knowledge of the conditions of the time, and
of the people to whom his revelation was
made, among whom he lived and worked; for
his ministry had in connection with it both a
time element and an eternal element. There

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 81

are two things that must be noted, the moral
and religious condition of the people; and,
again, their economic and political status.

The Jewish people had been preeminently
a religious people. But a great change had
taken place. Religion was at its lowest ebb.
Its spirit was well-nigh dead, and in its place
there had gradually come into being a Phara-
saic legalism — a religion of form, ceremony.
An extensive system of ecclesiastical tradition,
ecclesiastical law and observances, which had
gradually robbed the people of all their former
spirit of religion, had been gradually built up
by those in ecclesiastical authority.

The voice of that illustrious line of Hebrew
prophets had ceased to speak. It was close to
two hundred years since the voice of a living
prophet had been heard. Tradition had taken
its place. It took the form: Moses hath said;
It has been said of old ; The prophet hath said.
The scribe was the keeper of the ecclesiastical
law. The lawyer was its interpreter.

The Pharisees had gradually elevated them-
selves into an ecclesiastical hierarchy who were
the custodians of the law and religion. They
had come to regard themselves as especially
favoured, a privileged class — not only the cus-
todians but the dispensers of all religious
knowledge — and therefore of religion. The
people, in their estimation, were of a lower in-

82 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

tellectual and religious order, possessing no
capabilities in connection with religion or
morals, dependent therefore upon their su-
periors in these matters.

This state of affairs that had gradually come
about was productive of two noticeable results :
a religious starvation and stagnation on the
part of the great mass of the people on the
one hand, and the creation of a haughty, self-
righteous and domineering ecclesiastical
hierarchy on the other. In order for a clear
understanding of some of Jesus' sayings and
teachings, some of which constitute a very
vital part of his ministry, it is necessary to
understand clearly what this condition was.

Another important fact that sheds much
light upon the nature of the ministry of Jesus
is to be found, as has already been intimated,
in the political and the economic condition of
the people of the time. The Jewish nation
had been subjugated and were under the domi-
nation of Rome. Rome in connection with
Israel, as in connection with all conquered
peoples, was a hard master. Taxes and trib-
ute, tribute and taxes, could almost be said to
be descriptive of her administration of affairs.

She was already in her degenerate stage.
Never perhaps in the history of the world
had men been so ruled by selfishness, greed,
military power and domination, and the pomp

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 83

and display of material wealth. Luxury, in-
dulgence, over-indulgence, vice. The inevi-
table concomitant followed — a continually in-
creasing moral and physical degeneration.
An increasing luxury and indulgence called
for an increasing means to satisfy them. Mes-
sengers were sent and additional tribute was
levied. Pontius Pilate was the Roman ad-
ministrative head or governor in Judea at the
time. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman Em-
peror.

Rome at this time consisted of a few thou-
sand nobles and people of station — freemen —
and hundreds of thousands of slaves. Even
her campaigns in time became virtual raids
for plunder. She conquered — and she plun-
dered those whom she conquered. Great num-
bers from among the conquered peoples were
regularly taken to Rome and sold into slavery.
Judea had not escaped this. Thousands of
her best people had been transported to Rome
and sold into slavery. It was never known
where the blow would fall next; what homes
would be desolated and both sons and daugh-
ters sent away into slavery. No section, no
family could feel any sense of security. A
feeling of fear, a sense of desolation pervaded
everywhere.

There was a tradition, which had grown
into a well-defined belief, that a Deliverer

84 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

would be sent them, that they would be de-
livered out of the hands of their enemies and
that their oppressors would in turn be brought
to grief. There was also in the section round
about Judaea a belief, which had grown until
it had become well-nigh universal, that the
end of the world, or the end of the age, was
speedily coming, that then tnere would be an
end of all earthly government and that the
reign of Jehovah — the kingdom of God — would
be established. These two beliefs went hand
in hand. They were kept continually before
the people, and now and then received a fresh
impetus by the appearance of a new prophet
or a new teacher, whom the people went
gladly out to hear. Of this kind was John,
the son of a priest, later called John the
Baptist.

After his period of preparation, he came out
of the wilderness of Judaea, and in the region
about the Jordan with great power and per-
suasiveness, according to the accounts, he
gave utterance to the message: Repent ye,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. For-
sake all earthly things; they will be of avail
but a very short time now, turn ye from them
and prepare yourselves for the coming of the
Kingdom of God. The old things will speedily
pass away ; all things will become new. Many
went out to hear him and were powerfully

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 85

appealed to by the earnest, rugged utterances
of this new preacher of righteousness and re-
pentance.

His name and his message spread through
all the land of Judea and the country around
the Jordan. Many were baptised by him
there, he making use of this symbolic service
which had been long in use by certain branches
of the Jewish people, especially the order of
the Essenes.

Among those who went out to hear John
and who accepted baptism at his hands was
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, whose
home was at Nazareth. It marks also the be-
ginning of his own public ministry, for which
he evidently had been in preparation for a
considerable time.

It seems strange that we know so little of
the early life of one destined to exert such a
powerful influence upon the thought and the
life of the world. In the gospel of Mark,
probably the most reliable, because the near-
est to his time, there is no mention whatever
of his early life. The first account is where
he appears at John's meetings. Almost im-
mediately thereafter begins his own public
ministry.

In the gospel of Luke we have a very
meagre account of him. It is at the age of
twelve. The brief account gives us a glimpse

86 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

into the lives of his father and his mother,
Joseph and Mary; showing that at that time
they were not looked upon as in any way
different from all of the inhabitants of their
little community, Nazareth, the little town in
Galilee — having a family of several sons and
daughters, and that Jesus, the eldest of the
family, grew in stature and in knowledge, as
all the neighbouring children grew; but that
he, even at an early age, showed that he had
a wonderful aptitude for the things of the
spirit. I reproduce Luke's brief account here :
" Now, his parents went to Jerusalem every
year at the feast of the passover. And when
he was twelve years old, they went up to
Jerusalem, after the custom of the feast. And
when they had fulfilled the days, as they re-
turned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jeru-
salem: and Joseph and his mother knew not
of it. But they, supposing him to have been
in the company, went a day's journey; and
they sought him among their kinsfolk and
acquaintances. And when they found him
not, they turned back again to Jerusalem,
seeking him. And it came to pass that after
three days they found him in the temple, sit-
ting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing
them and asking them questions. And all
that heard him were astonished at his under-
standing and answers.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 87

" And when they saw him they were
amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son,
why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold,
thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.
And he said unto them, How is it that ye
sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about
my father's business? And they understood
not the saying which he spake unto them.
And he went down with them, and came to
Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his
mother kept all these sayings in her heart.
And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature,
and in favour with God and man."

Nothing could be more interesting than to
know the early life of Jesus. There are
various theories as to how this was spent, that
is, as to what his preparation was — the facts
of his life, in addition to his working with his
father at his trade, that of a carpenter ; but we
know nothing that has the stamp of historical
accuracy upon it. Of his entire life, indeed,
including the period of his active ministry,
from thirty to nearly thirty-three, it is but fair
to presume that we have at best but a frag-
mentary account in the Gospel narratives. It
is probable that many things connected with
his ministry, and many of his sayings and
teachings, we have no record of at all.

It is probable that in connection with his
preparation he spent a great deal of time

88 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

alone, in the quiet, in communion with his
Divine Source, or as the term came so nat-
urally to him, with God, his Father — God, our
Father, for that was his teaching — my God
and your God. The many times that we are
told in the narratives that he went to the
mountain alone, would seem to justify us in
this conclusion. Anyway, it would be abso-
lutely impossible for anyone to have such a
vivid realisation of his essential oneness with
the Divine, without much time spent in such a
manner that the real life could evolve into its
Divine likeness, and then mould the outer life
according to this ideal or pattern.

VII

THE DIVINE RULE IN THE MIND AND

HEART: THE UNESSENTIALS WE DROP

—THE SPIRIT ABIDES

That Jesus had a supreme aptitude for the
things of the spirit, there can be no question.
That through desire and through will he fol-
lowed the leadings of the spirit — that he
gave himself completely to its leadings —
is evident both from his utterances and his
life. It was this combination undoubtedly
that led him into that vivid sense of his life
in God, which became so complete that he
afterwards speaks — I and my Father are one.
That he was always, however, far from iden-
tifying himself as equal with God is indicated
by his constant declaration of his dependence
upon God. Again and again we have these
declarations : " My meat and drink is to do
the will of God." " My doctrine is not mine,
but his that sent me." " I can of myself do
nothing: as I hear I judge; and my judgment
is righteous; because I seek not mine own
will, but the will of him that sent me."

And even the very last acts and words of
89

go HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

his life proclaim this constant sense of de-
pendence for guidance, for strength, and even
for succour. With all his Divine self-realisa-
tion there was always, moreover, that sense
of humility that is always a predominating
characteristic of the really great. " Why call-
est thou me good? There is none good but
one — that is God."

It is not at all strange, therefore, that the
very first utterance of his public ministry,
according to the chronicler Mark was: The
Kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and
believe the gospel. And while this was the
beginning utterance, it was the keynote that
ran through his entire ministry. It is the
basic fact of all his teachings. The realisation
of his own life he sought to make the realisa-
tion of all others. It was, it is, a call to right-
eousness, and a call to righteousness through
the only channel that any such call can be
effective — through a realisation of the essen-
tial righteousness and goodness of the human
soul.

An unbiased study of Jesus' own words will
reveal the fact that he taught only what he
himself had first realised. It is this, moreover,
that makes him the supreme teacher of all
time — Counsellor, Friend, Saviour. » It is the
saving of men from their lower conceptions
and selves, a lifting of them up to their higher

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 91

selves, which, as he taught, is eternally one
with God, the Father, and which, when real-
ised, will inevitably, reflexly, one might say,
lift a man's thoughts, acts, conduct — the en-
tire life — up to that standard or pattern. It
is thus that the Divine ideal, that the Christ
becomes enthroned within. The Christ-con-
sciousness is the universal Divine nature in
us. It is the state of God-consciousness. It
is the recognition of the indwelling Divine life
as the source, and therefore the essence of our
own lives.

Jesus came as the revealer of a new truth,
a new conception of man. Indeed, the Mes-
siah. He came as the revealer of the only
truth that could lead his people out of their
trials and troubles — out of their bondage.
They were looking for their Deliverer to come
in the person of a worldly king and to set up
his rule as such. He came in the person of a
humble teacher, the revealer of a mighty truth,
the revealer of the Way, the only way
whereby real freedom and deliverance can
come. For those who would receive him, he
was indeed the Messiah. For those who
would not, he was not, and the same holds
today.

He came as the revealer of a truth which
had been glimpsed by many inspired teachers
among the Jewish race and among those of

§2 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

other races. The time waited, however, for
one to come who would first embody this
truth and then be able effectively to teach it.
This was done in a supreme degree by the
Judaean Teacher. He came not as the doer-
away with the Law and the Prophets, but
rather to regain and then to supplement them.
Such was his own statement.

It is time to ascend another round. I reveal
God to you, not in the Tabernacle, but in the
human heart — then in the Tabernacle in the
degree that He is in the hearts of those who
frequent the Tabernacle. Otherwise the Tab-
ernacle becomes a whited sepulchre. The
Church is not a building, an organisation, not
a creed. The Church is the Spirit of Truth.
It must have one supreme object and purpose
— to lead men to the truth. I reveal what I
have found — I in the Father and the Father
in me. I seek not to do mine own will, but
the will of the Father who sent me.

Everything was subordinated to this Divine
realisation and to his Divine purpose.

The great purpose at which he laboured so
incessantly was the teaching of the realisation
of the Divine will in the hearts and minds,
and through these in the lives of men — the
finding and the realisation of the Kingdom of
God. This is the supreme fact of life. Get
right at the centre and the circumference will

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 93

then care for itself. As is the inner, so always
and invariably will be the outer. There is an
inner guide that regulates the life when this
inner guide is allowed to assume authority.
Why be disconcerted, why in a heat concern-
ing so many things? It is not the natural and
the normal life. Life at its best is something
infinitely beyond this. " Seek ye first the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and
all these things shall be added unto you."
And if there is any doubt in regard to his real
meaning in this here is his answer : " Neither
shall they say, ' Lo here ' or ' Lo there ' for
behold the Kingdom of God is within you."

Again and again this is his call. Again and
again this is his revelation. In the first three
gospels alone he uses the expression " the
Kingdom of God," or "the Kingdom of
Heaven," upwards of thirty times. Any pos-
sible reference to any organisation that he
might have had in mind, can be found in the
entire four gospels but twice.

It would almost seem that it would not be
difficult to judge as to what was uppermost in
his mind. I have made this revelation to you ;
you must raise yourselves, you must become
in reality what in essence you really are. I in
the Father, and the Father in me. I reveal
only what I myself know. As I am, ye shall
be. God is your Father. In your real nature

94 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

you are Divine. Drop your ideas of the de-
pravity of the human soul. To believe it de-
praves. To teach it depraves the one who
teaches it, and the one who accepts it. Follow
not the traditions of men. I reveal to you
your Divine Birthright. Accept it. It is best.
Behold all things are become new. The King-
dom of God is the one all-inclusive thing.
Find it and all else will follow.

" Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of
God? Or with what comparison shall we
compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed,
which, when it is sown in the earth, is less
than all the seeds that be in the earth; but
when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh
greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great
branches; so that the fowls of the air may
lodge under the shadow of it." "Whereunto
shall I liken the kingdom of God? Is it like
leaven, which a woman took and hid in three
measures of meal, till the whole was leav-
ened?" Seek ye first the Kingdom, and the
Holy Spirit, the channel of communion be-
tween God your source, and yourselves, will
lead you, and will lead you into all truth. It
will become as a lamp to your feet, a guide
that is always reliable.

To refuse allegiance to the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit of Truth, is the real sin, the only sin
that cannot be forgiven. Violation of all

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 95

moral and natural law may be forgiven. It
will bring its penalty, for the violation of law
carries in itself its own penalty, its own pun-
ishment— it is a part of law; but cease the
violation and the penalty ceases. The vio-
lation registers its ill effects in the illness,
the sickness, of body and spirit. If the
violation has been long continued, these
effects may remain for some time; but the
instant the violation ceases the repair will be-
gin, and things will go the other way.

Learn from this experience, however, that
there can be no deliberate violation of, or
blaspheming against any moral or natural law.
But deliberately to refuse obedience to the
inner guide, the Holy Spirit, constitutes a de-
fiance that eventually puts out the lamp of
life, and that can result only in confusion and
darkness. It severs the ordained relationship,
the connecting, the binding cord, between the
soul — the self — and its Source. Stagnation,
degeneracy, and eventual death is merely the
natural sequence.

With this Divine self-realisation the Spirit
assumes control and mastery, and you are
saved from the follies of error, and from the
consequences of error. Repent ye — turn from
your trespasses and sins, from your lower
conceptions of life, of pleasure and of pain,
and walk in this way. The lower propensities

g6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

and desires will lose their hold and will in time
fall away. You will be at first surprised, and
then dumfounded, at what you formerly took
for pleasure. True pleasure and satisfaction
go hand in hand, — nor are there any bad after
results.

All genuine pleasures should lead to more
perfect health, a greater accretion of power, a
continually expanding sense of life and service.
When God is uppermost in the heart, when
the Divine rule under the direction of the
Holy Spirit becomes the ruling power in the
life of the individual, then the body and its
senses are subordinated to this rule; the pas-
sions become functions to be used ; license and
perverted use give way to moderation and
wise use ; and there are then no penalties that
outraged law exacts; satiety gives place to
satisfaction. It was Edward Carpenter who
said : " In order to enjoy life one must be a
master of life — for to be a slave to its incon-
sistencies can only mean torment ; and in order
to enjoy the senses one must be master of
them. To dominate the actual world you
must, like Archimedes, base your fulcrum
somewhere beyond."

It is not the use, but the abuse of anything
good in itself that brings satiety, disease, suf-
fering, dissatisfaction. Nor is asceticism a
true road of life. All things are for use; but

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 97

all must be wisely, in most cases, moderately
used, for true enjoyment. All functions and
powers are for use; but all must be brought
under the domination of the Spirit — the God-
illumined spirit. This is the road that leads
to heaven here and heaven hereafter — and we
can rest assured that we will never find a
heaven hereafter that we do not make while
here. Through everything runs this teaching
of the Master.

How wonderfully and how masterfully and
simply he sets forth h'is whole teaching of sin
and the sinner and his relation to the Father in
that marvellous parable, the Parable of the
Prodigal Son. To bring it clearly to mind
again it runs:

" A certain man had two sons : and the
younger of them said to his father, Father,
give me the portion of goods that falleth to
me. And he divided unto them his living.
And not many days after the younger son
gathered all together, and took his journey to
a far country, and there wasted his substance
with riotous living. And when he had spent
all, there arose a mighty famine in that land;
and he began to be in want. And he went and
joined himself to a citizen of that country ; and
he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And
he would fain have filled his belly with the
husks that the swine did eat : and no man gave

g8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

unto him. And when he came to himself, he
said, How many hired servants of my father's
have bread enough and to spare, and I perish
with hunger ! I will arise and go to my father,
and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned
against heaven, and before thee, and am no
more worthy to be called thy son: make me
as one of thy hired servants. And he arose
and came to his father.

" But when he was yet a great way off, his
father saw him, and had compassion, and ran,
and fell upon his neck, and kissed him. And
the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned
against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no
more worthy to be called thy son. But the
father said to his servants, Bring forth the best
robe and put it on him ; and put a ring on his
hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither
the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and
be merry; for this my son was dead, and is
alive again; he was lost, and is found. And
they began to be merry. Now his elder son
was in the field: and as he came and drew
nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing.
And he called one of the servants, and asked
what these things meant. And he said unto
him, Thy brother is come ; and thy father hath
killed the fatted calf, because he hath received
him safe and sound. And he was angry and
would not go in: therefore came his father

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 99

out, and entreated him, and he answering said
to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve
thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy
commandment; and yet thou never gavest me
a kid, that I might make merry with my
friends : but as soon as this thy son was come,
which hath devoured thy living with harlots,
thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And
he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me,
and all that I have is thine. It was meet that
we should make merry, and be glad: for this
thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and
was lost, and is found."

It does away forever in all thinking minds
with any participation of Jesus in that per-
verted and perverting doctrine that man is by
nature essentially depraved, degraded, fallen,
in the sense as was given to the world long,
long after his time in the doctrine of the Fall
of Man, and the need of redemption through
some external source outside of himself, in
distinction from the truth that he revealed
that was to make men free — the truth of their
Divine nature, and this love of man by the
Heavenly Father, and the love of the Heavenly
Father by His children.

To connect Jesus with any such thought or
teaching would be to take the heart out of
his supreme revelation. For his whole con-
ception of God the Father, given in all his

ioo HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

utterances, was that of a Heavenly Father of
love, of care, longing to exercise His protect-
ing care and to give good gifts to His children
— and this because it is the essential nature
of God to be fatherly. His Fatherhood is not,
therefore, accidental, not dependent upon any
conditions or circumstances; it is essential.

If it is the nature of a father to give good
gifts to his children, so in a still greater de-
gree is it the nature of the Heavenly Father
to give good gifts to those who ask Him. As
His words are recorded by Matthew : " Or
what man is there of you, whom if his son ask
bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he
ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your
Father which is in heaven give good things to
them that ask him? " So in the parable as
presented by Jesus, the father's love was such
that as soon as it was made known to him
that his son who had been lost to him had
returned, he went out to meet him ; he granted
him full pardon — and there were no condi-
tions.

Speaking of the fundamental teaching of
the Master, and also in connection with this
same parable, another has said : " It thus ap-
pears from this story, as elsewhere in the
teaching of Jesus, that he did not call God our

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 101

father because He created us, or because He
rules over us, or because He made a covenant
with Abraham, but simply and only because He
loves us. This parable individualises the divine
love, as did also the missionary activity of
Jesus. The gospels know nothing of a na-
tional fatherhood, of a God whose love is con-
fined to a particular people. It is the indi-
vidual man who has a heavenly Father, and
this individualised fatherhood is the only one
of which Jesus speaks. As he had realised his
own moral and spiritual life in the conscious-
ness that God was his father, so he sought
to give life to the world by a living revelation
of the truth that God loves each separate soul.
This is a prime factor in the religion and ethics
of Jesus. It is seldom or vaguely apprehended
in the Old Testament teaching; but in the
teaching of Jesus it is central and normative."
Again in the two allied parables of Jesus — the
Parable of the Lost Sheep, and the Parable of
the Lost Coin — it is his purpose to teach the
great love of the Father for all, including those
lost in their trespasses and sins, and His re-
joicing in their return.

This leads to Jesus' conception and teaching
of sin and repentance. Although God is the
Father, He demands filial obedience in the
hearts and the minds of His children. Men
by following the devices and desires of their

102 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

own hearts, are not true to their real nature,
their Divine pattern. By following their self-
ish desires they have brought sin, and thereby
suffering, on themselves and others. The un-
clean, the selfish desires of mind and heart,
keep them from their higher moral and spirit-
ual ideal — although not necessarily giving
themselves to gross sin. Therefore, they must
become sons of God by repenting — by turning
from the evil inclinations of their hearts and
seeking to follow the higher inclinations of
the heart as becomes children of God and those
who are dwellers in the Heavenly Kingdom.
Therefore, his opening utterance : " The time
is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand ;
repent ye, and believe the gospel."

Love of God with the whole heart, and love
of the neighbour, leading to the higher peace
and fulfilment, must take the place of these
more selfish desires that lead to antagonisms
and dissatisfactions both within and without.
All men are to pray : Forgive us our sins. All
men are to repent of their sins which are the
results of following their own selfish desires, —
those of the body, or their own selfish desires
to the detriment of the welfare of the
neighbour.

All men are to seek the Divine rule, the rule
of God in the heart, and thereby have the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is the

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 103

Divine spirit of wisdom that tabernacles with
man when through desire and through will he
makes the conditions whereby it can make its
abode with him. It is a manifestation of the
force that is above man — it is the eternal herit-
age of the soul. " Now the Lord is the Spirit
and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty." And therein lies salvation. It fol-
lows the seeking and the finding of the King-
dom of God and His righteousness that Jesus
revealed to a waiting world.

And so it was the spirit of religion that
Jesus came to reveal — the real Fatherhood of
God and the Divine Sonship of man. A better
righteousness than that of the scribes and the
Pharisees — not a slavish adherence to the
Law, with its supposed profits and rewards.
Get the motive of life right. Get the heart
right and these things become of secondary
importance. As his supreme revelation was
the personal fatherhood of God, from which
follows necessarily the Divine sonship of man,
so there was a corollary to it, a portion of it
almost as essential as the main truth itself —
namely, that all men are brothers. Not merely
those of one little group, or tribe or nation;
not merely those of any one little set or re-
ligion; not merely those of this or that little
compartment that we build and arbitrarily
separate ourselves into — but all men the world

io4 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

over. If this is not true then Jesus' supreme
revelation is false.

In connection with this great truth he
brought a new standard by virtue of the logic
of his revelation. " Ye have heard that it hath
been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and
hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them
which despitefully use you, and persecute you ;
that ye may be the children of your Father
which is in heaven." Struggling for recogni-
tion all through the Old Testament scriptures,
and breaking through partially at least in
places, was this conception which is at the
very basis of all man's relationship with man.

And finally through this supreme Master of
life it did break through, with a wonderful
newborn consciousness.

The old dispensation, with its legal formal-
ism, was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth. The new dispensation was — " But I
say unto you, Love your enemies." Enmity
begets enmity. It is as senseless as it is god-
less. It runs through all his teachings 'and
through every act of his life. If fundamen-
tally you do not have the love of your fellow-
man in your hearts, you do not have the love
of God in your hearts and you cannot have.

And that this fundamental revelation be not

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 105

misunderstood, near the close of his life he
said : " A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another." No man could be,
can be his disciple, his follower, and fail in
the realisation of this fundamental teaching.
" By this shall all men know that ye are my
disciples, if ye love one another." And going
back again to his ministry we find that it
breathes through every teaching that he gave.
It breathes through that short memorable
prayer which we call the Lord's Prayer. It
permeates the Sermon on the Mount. It is
the very essence of his summing up of this

discourse. We call it the Golden Rule.
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do ye even so to them." Not that it
was original with Jesus; other teachers sent
of God had given it before to other peoples —
God's other children; but he gave it a new
emphasis, a new setting. He made it funda-
mental.

So a man who is gripped at all vitally by
Jesus' teaching of the personal fatherhood of
God, and the personal brotherhood of man,
simply can't help but make this the basic rule
of his life — and moreover find joy in so mak-
ing it. A man who really comprehends this
fundamental teaching can't be crafty, sneak-
ing, dishonest, or dishonourable, in his busi-
ness, or in any phase of his personal life. He

io6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

never hogs the penny — in other words, he
never seeks to gain his own advantage to the
disadvantage of another. He may be long-
headed; he may be able to size up and seize
conditions ; but he seeks no advantage for him-
self to the detriment of his fellow, to the detri-
ment of his community, or to the detriment of
his extended community, the nation or the
world. He is thoughtful, considerate, open,
frank; and, moreover, he finds great joy in
being so.

I have never seen any finer statement of the
essential reasonableness, therefore, of the
essential truth of the value and the practice
of the Golden Rule than that given by a mod-
ern disciple of Jesus who left us but a few
years ago. A poor boy, a successful business
man, straight, square, considerate in all his
dealings, — a power among his fellows, a lamp
indeed to the feet of many — was Samuel Mil-
ton Jones, thrice mayor of Toledo. Simple,
unassuming, friend of all, rich as well as poor,
poor as well as rich, friend of the outcast,
the thief, the criminal, looking beyond the ex-
terior, he saw as did Jesus, the human soul
always intact, though it erred in its judgment
— as we all err in our judgments, each in his
own peculiar way — and that by forbearance,
consideration, and love, it could be touched
and the life redeemed — redeemed to happiness,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 107

to usefulness, to service. Notwithstanding his
many duties, business and political, he thought
much and he loved to talk of the things we
are considering.

His brief statement of the fundamental rea-
sons and the comprehensive results of the
actual practice of the Golden Rule are shot
through with such fine insight, such abound-
ing comprehension, that they deserve to be-
come immortal. He was my friend and I
would not see them die. I reproduce them
here : " As I view it, the Golden Rule is the
supreme law of life. It may be paraphrased
this way: As you do unto others, others will
do unto you. What I give, I get. If I love
you, really and truly and actively love you,
you are as sure to love me in return as the
earth is sure to be warmed by the rays of the
midsummer sun. If I hate you, ill-treat you
and abuse you, I am equally certain to arouse
the same kind of antagonism towards me, un-
less the Divine nature is so developed that it
is dominant in you, and you have learned to
love your enemies. What can be plainer?
The Golden Rule is the law of action and
reaction in the field of morals, just as definite,
just as certain here as the law is definite and
certain in the domain of physics.

" I think the confusion with respect to the
Golden Rule arises from the different concep-

io8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

tions that we have of the word love. I use
the word love as synonymous with reason, and
when I speak of doing the loving thing, I mean
the reasonable thing. When I speak of dealing
with my fellow-men in an unreasonable way,
I mean an unloving way. The terms are inter-
changeable, absolutely. The reason why we
know so little about the Golden Rule is be-
cause we have not practised it."

Was Mayor Jones a Christian? you ask.
He was a follower of the Christ — for it was he
who said : " By this shall all men know ye
are my disciples, if ye love one another." Was
he a member of a religious organisation? I
don't know — it never occurred to me to ask
him. Thinking men the world over are mak-
ing a sharp distinction in these days between
organised Christianity and essential Chris-
tianity.

The element of fear has lost its hold on the
part of thinking men and women. It never
opened up, it never can open up the springs
of righteousness in the human heart. He be-
lieved and he acted upon the belief that it was
the spirit that the Master taught — that God
is a God of love and that He reveals Himself
in terms of love to those who really know Him.
He believed that there is joy to the human
soul in following this inner guide and trans-
lating its impulses into deeds of love and serv-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 109

ice for one's fellow-men. If we could, if we
would thus translate religion into terms of life,
it would become a source of perennial joy.

It is not with observation, said Jesus, that
the supreme thing that he taught — the seek-
ing and finding of the Kingdom of God — will
come. Do not seek it at some other place,
some other time. It is within, and if within
it will show forth. Make no mistake about
that, — it will show forth. It touches and it
sensitises the inner springs of action in a man's
or a woman's life. When a man realises his
Divine sonship that Jesus taught, he will act
as a son of God. Out of the heart spring
either good or evil actions. Self-love, me,
mine ; let me get all I can for myself, or, thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself — the
Divine law of service, of mutuality — the high-
est source of ethics.

You can trust any man whose heart is right.
He will be straight, clean, reliable. His word
will be as good as his bond. Personally you
can't trust a man who is brought into any line
of action, or into any institution through fear.
The sore is there, liable to break out in cor-
ruption at any time. This opening up of the
springs of the inner life frees him also from
the letter of the law, which after all consists
of the traditions of men, and makes him sub-
ject to that higher moral guide within. How

no HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

clearly Jesus illustrated this in his conversa-
tions regarding the observance of the Sab-
bath— how the Sabbath was made for man and
not man for the Sabbath, and how it was al-
ways right to do good on the Sabbath.

I remember some years ago a friend in my
native state telling me the following interest-
ing incident in connection with his grand-
mother. It was in northern Illinois — it might
have been in New England. " As a boy," said
he, " I used to visit her on the farm. She loved
her cup of coffee for breakfast. Ordinarily
she would grind it fresh each morning in the
kitchen; but when Sunday morning came she
would take her coffee-grinder down into the
far end of the cellar, where no one could see
and no one could hear her grind it." He could
never quite tell, he said, whether it was to
ease her own conscience, or in order to give no
offence to her neighbours.

Now, I can imagine Jesus passing by and
stopping at that home — it was a home known
for its native kindly hospitality — and meeting
her just as she was coming out of the cellar
with her coffee-grinder — his quick and unerr-
ing perception enabling him to take in the
whole situation at once, and saying : " In the
name of the Father, Aunt Susan, what were
you doing with your coffee-grinder down in
the cellar on this beautiful Sabbath morning?

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT in

You like your cup of coffee, and I also like
the coffee that you make ; thank God that you
have it, and thank God that you have the good
health to enjoy it. We can give praise to the
Father through eating and drinking, if, as in
everything else, these are done in moderation
and we give value received for all the things
that we use. So don't take your grinder down
into the cellar on the Sabbath morning; but
grind your coffee up here in God's sunshine,
with a thankful heart that you have it to
grind."

And I can imagine him, as he passes out of
the little front gate, turning and waving an-
other good-bye and saying : " When I come
again, Aunt Susan, be it week-day or Sabbath,
remember God's sunshine and keep out of the
cellar." And turning again in a half-joking
manner : " And when you take those baskets of
eggs to town, Aunt Susan, don't pick out too
many of the large ones to keep for yourself,
but take them just as the hens lay them. And,
Aunt Susan, give good weight in your butter.
This will do your soul infinitely more good
than the few extra coins you would gain by
too carefully calculating " — Aunt Susan with
all her lovable qualities, had a little tendency
to close dealing.

I think we do incalculable harm by separat-
ing Jesus so completely from the more homely,

commonplace affairs of our daily lives. If we
had a more adequate account of his discourses
with the people and his associations with the
people, we would perhaps find that he was not,
after all, so busy in saving the world that he
didn't have time for the simple, homely en-
joyments and affairs of the every-day life. The
little glimpses that we have of him along
these lines indicate to me that he had. Un-
less we get his truths right into this phase of
our lives, the chances are that we will miss
them entirely.

And I think that with all his earnestness,
Jesus must have had an unusually keen sense
of humour. With his unusual perceptions and
his unusual powers in reading and in under-
standing human nature, it could not be other-
wise. That he had a keen sense for beauty;
that he saw it, that he valued it, that he loved
it, especially beauty in all nature, many of
his discourses so abundantly prove. Religion
with him was not divorced from life. It was
the power that permeated every thought and
every act of the daily life.

VIII

IF WE SEEK THE ESSENCE OF HIS REV-
ELATION, AND THE PURPOSE OF
HIS LIFE

If we would seek the essence of Jesus'
revelation, attested both by his words and his
life, it was to bring a knowledge of the in-
effable love of God to man, and by revealing
this, to instil in the minds and hearts of men
love for God, and a knowledge of and follow-
ing of the ways of God. It was also then to
bring a new emphasis of the Divine law of
love — the love of man for man. Combined, it
results, so to speak, in raising men to a higher
power, to a higher life, — as individuals, as
groups, as one great world group.

It is a newly sensitised attitude of mind
and heart that he brought and that he en-
deavoured to reveal in all its matchless beauty
— a following not of the traditions of men, but
fidelity to one's God, whereby the Divine rule
in the mind and heart assumes supremacy and,
as must inevitably follow, fidelity to one's fel-
low-men. These are the essentials of Jesus'
revelation — the fundamental forces in his own
113

H4 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

Jife. His every teaching, his every act, comes
back to them. I believe also that all efforts
to mystify the minds of men and women by
later theories about him are contrary to his own
expressed teaching, and in exact degree that
they would seek to substitute other things for
these fundamentals.

I call them fundamentals. I call them his
fundamentals. What right have I to call them
his fundamentals?

An occasion arose one day in the form of a
direct question for Jesus to state in well-con-
sidered and clear-cut terms the essence, the
gist, of his entire teachings — therefore, by his
authority, the fundamentals of essential Chris-
tianity. In the midst of one of the groups that
he was speaking to one day, we are told that
a certain lawyer arose — an interpreter of, an
authority on, the existing ecclesiastical law.
The reference to him is so brief, unfortunately,
that we cannot tell whether his question was
to confound Jesus, as was so often the case,
or whether being a liberal Jew he longed for
an honest and truly helpful answer. From
Jesus' remark to him, after his primary an-
swer, we are justified in believing it was the
latter.

His question was : " Master, which is the
great commandment in the law? " Jesus said
unto him, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 115

God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind. This is the first and
great commandment. And the second is like
unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself. On these two commandments hang
all the law and the prophets."

Here we have a wonderful statement from
a wonderful source. So clear-cut is it that any
wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot mistake
it. Especially is this true when we couple
with it this other statement of Jesus : " Think
not that I am come to destroy the law, or the
prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to
fulfil." We must never forget that Jesus was
born, lived, and died a Jew, the same as all
of his disciples — and they never regarded
themselves in any other light. The basis of
his religion was the religion of Israel. It was
this he taught and expounded, now in the
synagogue, now out on the hillside and by the
lake-side. It was this that he tried to teach
in its purity, that he tried to free from the
hedges that ecclesiasticism had built around
it, this that he endeavoured to raise to a still
higher standard.

One cannot find the slightest reference in
any of his sayings that would indicate that he
looked upon himself in any other light — ex-
cept the overwhelming sense that it was his
mission to bring in the new dispensation by

u6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

fulfilling the old, and then carrying it another
great step forward, which he did in a wonder-
ful way — both God-ward and man-ward.

We must not forget, then, that Jesus said
that he did not come to destroy the Law and
the Prophets, but to fulfil them. We must
not forget, however, that before fulfilling them
he had to free them. The freedom-giving,
God-illumined words spoken by free God-
illumined men, had, in the hands of those not
God-illumined, later on become institutional-
ised, made into a system, a code. The people
were taught that only the priests had access
to God. They were the custodians of God's
favour and only through the institution could
any man, or any woman, have access to God.
This became the sacred thing, and as the years
had passed this had become so hedged about
by continually added laws and observances
that all the spirit of religion had become
crushed, stifled, beaten to the ground.

The very scribes and Pharisees themselves,
supposed to minister to the spiritual life and
the welfare of the people, became enrobed in
their fine millinery and arrogance, masters of
the people, whose ministers they were sup-
posed to be, as is so apt to be the case when
an institution builds itself upon the free, all-
embracing message of truth given by any
prophet or any inspired teacher. It has

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 117

occurred time and time again. Christianity
knows it well. It is only by constant vigilance
that religious freedom is preserved, from
which alone conies any high degree of mo-
rality, or any degree of free and upward-
moving life among the people.

It was on account of this shameful robbing
of the people of their Divine birthright that
the just soul of Jesus, abhorring both casuistry
and oppression under the cloak of religion,
gave utterance to that fine invective that he
used on several occasions, the only times that
he spoke in a condemnatory or accusing man-
ner : " Now do ye, Pharisee, make clean the
outside of the cup and the platter; but your
inward part is full of ravening and wicked-
ness. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For ye are as graves which ap-
pear not, and the men that walk over them
are not aware of them. . . . Woe unto you
also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with bur-
dens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves
touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.
. . . Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have
taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered
not in yourselves, and them that were enter-
ing in ye hindered."

And here is the lesson for us. It is the
spirit that must always be kept uppermost in
religion. Otherwise even the revelation and

n8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the religion of Jesus could be compressed into
a code, with its self-appointed instruments of
interpretation, the same as the Pharisees did
the Law and the Prophets that he so bitterly
condemned, with a bravery so intrepid and so
fearless that it finally caused his death.

No, if God is not in the human soul wait-
ing to make Himself known to the believing,
longing heart, accessible to all alike without
money and without price, without any pre-
scribed code, then the words of Jesus have not
been correctly handed down to us. And then
again, confirming us in the belief that a man's
deepest soul relation is a matter between him
and his God, are his unmistakable and explicit
directions in regard to prayer.

It is so easy to substitute the secondary
thing for the fundamental, the by-thing for
the essential, the container for the thing itself.
You will recall that symbolic act of Jesus at
the last meeting, the Last Supper with his dis-
ciples, the washing of the disciples' feet by
the Master. The point that is intended to be
brought out in the story is, of course, the
extraordinary condescension of Jesus in doing
this menial service for his disciples. " The
feet-washing symbolises the attitude of hum-
ble service to others. Every follower of
Jesus must experience it." One of the dis-
ciples is so astonished, even taken aback by

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT ng

this menial service on the part of Jesus, that
he says: Thou shall never wash my feet.
Jesus answered him, " If I wash thee not, thou
hast no part with me."

In Oriental countries where sandals are
worn that cover merely the soles of the feet,
it was, it is the custom of the host to offer
his guest who comes water with which to wash
his feet. There is no reason why this simple
incident of humble service, or rather this
symbolic act of humble service, could not be
taken and made an essential condition of sal-
vation by any council that saw fit to make it
such. Things just as strange as this have
happened ; though any thinking man or woman
to-day would deem it essentially foolish.

It is an example of how the spirit of a
beautiful act could be misrepresented to the
people. For if you will look at them again,
Jesus' words are very explicit : "If I wash
thee not, thou hast no part with me." But
hear Jesus' own comment as given in John:
" So after he had washed their feet, and had
taken his garments, and was set down again,
he said unto them, Know ye what I have done
to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and
ye say well ; for so I am. If I then, your Lord
and Master, have washed your feet, ye also
ought to wash one another's feet. For I have
given you an example, that ye should do as I

120 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto
you, The servant is not greater than his lord;
neither he that is sent greater than he that
sent him. If ye know these things, happy are
ye if ye do them." It is a means to an end
and not an end in itself. The spirit that it
typifies is essential ; but not the act itself.

The same could be rightly said of the Lord's
Supper. It is an observance that can be made
of great value, one very dear and valuable to
many people. But it cannot, if Jesus is to be
our authority, and if correctly reported, be
by any means made a fundamental, an essen-
tial of salvation. From the rebuke admin-
istered by Jesus to his disciples in a number
of cases where they were prone to drag down
his meanings by their purely material inter-
pretations, we should be saved from this.

You will recall his teaching one day when
he spoke of himself as the bread of life that
a man may eat thereof and not die. Some of
his Jewish hearers taking his words in a ma-
terial sense and arguing in regard to them one
with another said : " How can this man give
us his flesh to eat? " Hearing them Jesus re-
affirming his statement said : " Verily, verily, I
say unto you, except ye eat of the flesh of the
Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have not
life in yourselves. . . . For my flesh is meat
indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." His

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 121

disciples, likewise, prone here as so often to
make a literal and material interpretation of
his statements, said one to another : " This is
a hard saying; who can hear him?" Or
according to our idiom — who can understand
him? Jesus asked them squarely if what he
had just said caused them to stumble, and in
order to be sure that they might not miss his
real meaning and therefore teaching, said : " It
is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth
nothing : the words that I speak unto you, they
are spirit, and they are life."

Try as we will, we cannot get away from
the fact that it was the words of truth that
Jesus brought that were ever uppermost in
his mind. He said, Follow me, not some one
else, nor something else that would claim to
represent me. And follow me merely because
I lead you to the Father.

So supremely had this young Jewish
prophet, the son of a carpenter, made God's
business his business, that he had come into
the full realisation of the oneness of his life
with the Father's life. He was able to realise
and to say, " I and my Father are one." He
was able to bring to the world a knowledge of
the great fact of facts — the essential oneness
of the human with the Divine — that God taber-
nacles with men, that He makes His abode
in the minds and the hearts of those who

122 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT'

through desire and through will open their
hearts to His indwelling presence.

The first of the race, he becomes the re-
vealer of this great eternal truth — the media-
tor, therefore, between God and man — in very
truth the Saviour of men. " If a man love me,"
said he, " he will keep my words : and my
Father will love him, and we will come unto
him, and make our abode with him. ... If
ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in
my love; even as I have kept my Father's
commandments and abide in his love."

It is our eternal refusal to follow Jesus by
listening to the words of life that he brought,
and our proneness to substitute something else
in their place, that brings the barrenness that
is so often evident in the everyday life of the
Christian. We have been taught to believe in
Jesus; we have not been taught to believe
Jesus. This has resulted in a separation of
Christianity from life. The predominating
motive has been the saving of the soul. It has
resulted too often in a selfish, negative, repres-
sive, ineffective religion. As Jesus said : " And
why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the
things which I say?"

We are just beginning to realise at all
adequately that it was the salvation of the life
that he taught. When the life is redeemed to
righteousness through the power of the in-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 123

dwelling God and moves out in love and in
service for one's fellow-men, the soul is then
saved.

A man may be a believer in Jesus for a mil-
lion years and still be an outcast from the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness. But
a man can't believe Jesus, which means follow-
ing his teachings, without coming at once into
the Kingdom and enjoying its matchless
blessings both here and hereafter. And if
there is one clear-cut teaching of the Master,
it is that the life here determines and with
absolute precision the life to come.

One need not then concern himself with this
or that doctrine, whether it be true or false.
Later speculations and theories are not for
him. Jesus' own saying applies here : " If any
man will do his will he shall know of the doc-
trine, whether it be of God." He enters into
the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven here
and now; and when the time comes for him
to pass out of this life, he goes as a joyous
pilgrim, full of anticipation for the Kingdom
that awaits him, and the Master's words go
with him : " In my Father's house are many
mansions."

By thus becoming a follower of Jesus rather
than merely a believer in Jesus, he gradually
comes into possession of insights and powers
that the Master taught would follow in the

124 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

lives of those who became his followers. The
Holy Spirit, the Divine Comforter, of which
Jesus spoke, the Spirit of Truth, that awaits
our bidding, will lead continually to the high-
est truth and wisdom and insight and power.
Kant's statement, " The other world is not
another locality, but only another way of see-
ing things," is closely allied to the Master's
statement : " The Kingdom of God is within
you." And closely allied to both is this
statement of a modern prophet : " The prin-
ciple of Christianity and of every true re-
ligion is within the soul — the realisation
of the incarnation of God in every human
being."

When we turn to Jesus' own teachings we
find that his insistence was not primarily upon
the saving of the soul, but upon the saving of
the life for usefulness, for service, here and
now, for still higher growth and unfoldment,
whereby the soul might be grown to a suffi-
cient degree that it would be worth the saving.
And this is one of the great facts that is now
being recognised and preached by the forward-
looking men and women in our churches and
by many equally religious outside of our
churches.

And so all aspiring, all thinking, forward-
looking men and women of our day are not
interested any more in theories about, expla-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 125

nations of, or dogmas about Jesus. They are
being won and enthralled by the wonderful
personality and life of Jesus. They are being
gripped by the power of his teachings. They
do not want theories about God — they want
God — and God is what Jesus brought — God
as the moving, the predominating, the all-
embracing force in the individual life. But
he who finds the Kingdom of God, whose life
becomes subject to the Divine rule and life
within, realises at once also his true relations
with the whole — with his neighbour, his
fellow-men. He realises that his neighbour
is not merely the man next door, the man
around the corner, or even the man in the
next town or city; but that his neighbour is
every man and every woman in the world —
because all children of the same infinite Father,
all bound in the same direction, but over many
different roads.

The man who has come under the influence
and the domination of the Divine rule, realises
that his interests lie in the same direction as
the interests of all, that he cannot gain for
himself any good — that is, any essential good
— at the expense of the good of all ; but rather
that his interests, his welfare, and the interests
and the welfare of all others are identical.
God's rule, the Divine rule, becomes for him,
therefore, the fundamental rule in the business

126 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

world, the dominating rule in political life and
action, the dominating rule in the law and
relations of nations,

Jesus did not look with much favour upon
outward form, ceremony, or with much favour
upon formulated, or formal religion; and he
somehow or other seemed to avoid the com-
pany of those who did. We find him almost
continually down among the people, the poor,
the needy, the outcast, the sinner — wherever
he could be of service to the Father, that is,
wherever he could be of service to the Father's
children. According to the accounts he was
inot always as careful in regard to those with
whom he associated as the more respectable
ones, the more respectable classes of his day
thought he should be. They remarked it many
times. Jesus noticed it and remarked in
turn.

We find him always where the work was
to be done — friend equally of the poor and
humble, and those of station — truly friend of
man, teaching, helping, uplifting. And then
we find him out on the mountain side — in the
quiet, in communion — to keep his realisation of
his oneness with the Father intact; and with
this help he went down regularly to the peo-
ple, trying to lift their minds and lives up to
the Divine ideal that he revealed to them, that
they in turn might realise their real relations

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 127

one with another, that the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness might grow and become
the dominating law and force in the world —
" Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on
earth as it is in Heaven."

It is this Kingdom idea, the Divine rule, the
rule of God in all of the relations and affairs of
men on earth that is gripping earnest men and
women in great numbers among us to-day.
Under the leadership of these thinking, God-
impelled men and women, many of our
churches are pushing their endeavours out into
social service activities along many different
lines; and the result is they are calling into
their ranks many able men and women,
especially younger men and women, who
are intensely religious, but to whom for-
mal, inactive religion never made any ap-
peal.

When the Church begins actually to throw
the Golden Rule onto its banner, not in theory
but in actual practice, actually forgetting self
in the Master's service, careless even of her
own interests, her membership, she thereby
calls into her ranks vast numbers of the best
of the race, especially among the young, so
that the actual result is a membership not only
larger than she could ever hope to have other-
wise, but a membership that commands such
respect and that exercises such power, that

128 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

she is astounded at her former stupidity in
being shackled so long by the traditions of the
past. A new life is engendered. There is the
joy of real accomplishment.

We are in an age of great changes. Advanc-
ing knowledge necessitates changes. And
may I say a word here to our Christian minis-
try, that splendid body of men for whom I
have such supreme admiration? One of the
most significant facts of our time is this wide-
spread inclination and determination on the
part of such great numbers of thinking men
and women to go directly to Jesus for their
information of, and their inspiration from him.
The beliefs and the voice of the laymen, those
in our churches and those out of our churches,
must be taken into account and reckoned with.
Jesus is too large and too universal a charac-
ter to be longer the sole possession, the prop-
erty of any organisation.

There is a splendid body of young men and
young women numbering into untold thou-
sands, who are being captured by the person-
ality and the simple direct message of Jesus.
Many of these have caught his spirit and are
going off into other lines of the Master's serv-
ice. They are doing effective and telling
work there. Remember that when the spirit
of the Christ seizes a man, it is through the
channel of present-day forms and present-day

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 139

terms, not in those of fifteen hundred, or six-
teen hundred, or even three hundred years ago.

There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that
prevents many men and women from subscrib-
ing to anything to which they cannot give
their intellectual assent, as well as their moral
and spiritual assent. They do not object to
creeds. They know that a creed is but a state-
ment, a statement of a man's or a woman's
belief, whether it be in connection with reli-
gion, or in connection with anything else. But
what they do object to is dogma, that unholy
thing that lives on credulity, that is therefore
destructive of the intellectual and the moral
life of every man and every woman who al-
lows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them,
that can be held to if one is at all honest and
given to thought, only through intellectual
chicanery.

We must not forget also that God is still at
work, revealing Himself more fully to man-
kind through modern prophets, through mod-
ern agencies. His revelation is not closed.
It is still going on. The silly presumption in
the statement therefore — " the truth once de-
livered."

It is well occasionally to call to mind these
words by Robert Burns, singing free and with
an untrammelled mind and soul from his
heather-covered hills:

130 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write ;

There's nane ever feared that the truth should

be heared
But them that the truth wad indict.

It is essential to remember that we are in
possession of knowledge, that we are face to
face with conditions that are different from
any in the previous history of Christendom.
The Christian church must be sure that it
moves fast enough so as not to alienate, but
to draw into it that great body of intellectually
alive, intellectually honest young men and
women who have the Christ spirit of service
and who are mastered by a great purpose of
accomplishment. Remember that these young
men and women are now merely standing
where the entire church will stand in a few
years. Remember that any man or woman
who has the true spirit of service has the spirit
of Christ — and more, has the religion of the
Christ.

Remember that Jesus formulated no organi-
sation. His message of the Kingdom was so
far-reaching that no organisation could ever
possibly encompass it, though an organisation
may be, and has been, a great aid in actual-
ising it here on earth. He never made any
conditions as to through whom, or what, his

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 131

truth should be spread, and he would condemn
today any instrumentality that would abrogate
to itself any monopoly of his truth, just as he
condemned those ecclesiastical authorities of
his day who presumed to do the same in
connection with the truth of God's earlier
prophets.

And so I would say to the Church — beware
and be wise. Make your conditions so that
you can gain the allegiance and gain the help
of this splendid body of young men and young
women. Many of them are made of the stock
that Jesus would choose as his own apostles.
Among the young men will be our greatest
teachers, our great financiers, our best legis-
lators, our most valuable workers and organ-
isers in various fields of social service, our
most widely read authors, eminent and in-
fluential editorial and magazine writers as
well as managers.

Many of these young women will have high
and responsible positions as educators. Some
will be heads and others will be active workers
in our widely extended and valuable women's
clubs. Some will have a hand in political ac-
tion, in lifting politics out of its many-times
low condition into its rightful state in being
an agent for the accomplishment of the peo-
ple's best purposes and their highest good.
Some will be editors of widely circulating and

132 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

influential women's magazines. Some will be
mothers, true mothers of the children of
others, denied their rights and their privileges.
Make it possible for them, nay, make it incum-
bent upon them to come in, to work within
the great Church organisation.

It cannot afford that they stay out. It is
suicidal to keep them out. Any other type of
organisation that did not look constantly to
commanding the services of the most capable
and expert in its line would fall in a very few
months into the ranks of the ineffectives. A
business or a financial organisation that did
not do the same would go into financial bank-
ruptcy in even a shorter length of time. By
attracting this class of men and women into
its ranks it need fear neither moral nor finan-
cial bankruptcy.

But remember, many men and women of
large calibre are so busy doing God's work
in the world that they have no time and no
inclination to be attracted by anything that
does not claim their intellectual as well as
their moral assent. The Church must speak
fully and unequivocally in terms of present-day
thought and present-day knowledge, to win
the allegiance or even to attract the attention
of this type of men and women.

And may I say here this word to those out-
side, and especially to this class of young men

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 133

and young women outside of our churches?
Changes, and therefore advances in matters
of this kind come slowly. This is true from
the very nature of human nature. Inherited
beliefs, especially when it comes to matters
of religion, take the deepest hold and are the
slowest to change. Not in all cases, but this
is the general rule.

Those who hold on to the old are earnest,
honest. They believe that these things are
too sacred to be meddled with, or even some-
times, to be questioned. The ordinary mind
is slow to distinguish between tradition and
truth — especially where the two have been so
fully and so adroitly mixed. Many are not in
possession of the newer, the more advanced
knowledge in various fields that you are in
possession of. But remember this — in even a
dozen years a mighty change has taken place
— except in a church whose very foundation
and whose sole purpose is dogma.

In most of our churches, however, the great
bulk of our ministers are just as forward-
looking, just as earnest as you, and are deeply
desirous of following and presenting the high-
est truth in so far as it lies within their power
to do so. It is a splendid body of men, willing
to welcome you on your own grounds, longing
for your help. It is a mighty engine for good.
Go into it. Work with it. Work through it.

134 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

The best men in the Church are longing for
your help. They need it more than they need
anything else. I can assure you of this — I
have talked with many.

They feel their handicaps. They are mov-
ing as rapidly as they find it possible to move.
On the whole, they are doing splendid work
and with a big, fine spirit of which you know
but little. You will find a wonderful spirit of
self-sacrifice, also. You will find a stimulating
and precious comradeship on the part of many.
You will find that you will get great good,
even as you are able to give great good.

The Church, as everything else, needs to
keep its machinery in continual repair. Help
take out the worn-out parts — but not too sud-
denly. The Church is not a depository, but
an instrument and engine of truth and right-
eousness. Some of the older men do not
realise this; but they will die off. Respect
their beliefs. Honest men have honest respect
for differences of opinion, for honest differ-
ences in thought. Sympathy is a great har-
moniser. " Differences of opinion, intellectual
distinctions, these must ever be — separation
of mind, but unity of heart."

I like these words of Lyman Abbott. You
will like them. They are spoken out of a full
life of rich experience and splendid service.
They have, moreover, a sort of unifying effect.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 135

They are more than a tonic : " Of all charac-
ters in history none so gathers into himself
and reflects from himself all the varied virtues
of a complete manhood as does Jesus of Naza-
reth. And the world is recognising it. ...
If you go back to the olden time and the old
conflicts, the question was, ' What is the rela-
tion of Jesus Christ to the Eternal?' Wars
have been fought over the question, ' Was he
of one substance with the Father? ' I do not
know; I do not know of what substance the
Father is; I do not know of what substance
Jesus Christ is. What I do know is this —
that when I look into the actual life that I
know about, the men and women that are
about me, the men and women in all the his-
tory of the past, of all the living beings that
ever lived and walked the earth, there is no
one that so fills my heart with reverence, with
affection, with loyal love, with sincere desire
to follow, as doth Jesus Christ. . . .

" I do not need to decide whether he was
born of a virgin. I do not need to decide
whether he rose from the dead. I do not
need to decide whether he made water into
wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves and
five small fishes. Take all that away, and
still he stands the one transcendent figure to-
ward whom the world has been steadily grow-
ing, and whom the world has not yet over-

136 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

taken even in his teachings. ... I do not need
to know what is his metaphysical relation to
the Infinite. I say it reverently — I do not
care. I know for me he is the great Teacher;
I know for me he is the great Leader whose
work I want to do; and I know for me he is
the great Personality, whom I want to be like.
That I know. Theology did not give that to
me, and theology cannot get it away from
me."

And what a basis as a test of character is
this twofold injunction — this great fundamen-
tal of Jesus! All religion that is genuine
flowers in character. It was Benjamin Jowett
who said, and most truly : " The value of a re-
ligion is in the ethical dividend that it pays."
When the heart is right towards God we have
the basis, the essence of religion — the con-
sciousness of God in the soul of man. We
have truth in the inward parts. When the
heart is right towards the fellow-man we have
the essential basis of ethics; for again we
have truth in the inward parts.

Out of the heart are the issues of life. When
the heart is right all outward acts and rela-
tions are right. Love draws one to the very
heart of God; and love attunes one to all the
highest and most valued relationships in our
human life.

Fear can never be a basis of either religion

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 137

or ethics. The one who is moved by fear
makes his chief concern the avoidance of de-
tection on the one hand, or the escape of pun-
ishment on the other. Men of large calibre
have an unusual sagacity in sifting the un-
essential from the essential as also the false
from the true. Lincoln, when replying to the
question as to why he did not unite himself
with some church organisation, said : " When
any church will inscribe over its altar, as its
sole qualification of membership, the Saviour's
condensed statement of the substance of both
law and gospel: Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neigh-
bour as thyself, that church shall I join with
all my heart and soul."

He was looked upon by many in his day as
a non-Christian — by some as an infidel. His
whole life had a profound religious basis, so
deep and so all-absorbing that it gave him
those wonderful elements of personality that
were instantly and instinctively noticed by,
and that moved all men who came in touch
with him; and that sustained him so wonder-
fully, according to his own confession, through
those long, dark periods of the great crisis.
The fact that m yesterday's New York paper
— Sunday paper — I saw the notice of a sermon
in one of our Presbyterian pulpits — Lincoln,

138 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the Christian — shows that we have moved up
a round and are approaching more and more
to an essential Christianity.

Similar to this statement or rather belief
was that of Emerson, Jefferson, Franklin, and
a host of other men among us whose lives have
been lives of accomplishment and service for
their fellow-men. Emerson, who said : " A
man should learn to detect and watch that
gleam of light which flashes across his mind
from within, more than the lustre of the firma-
ment of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is his.
In every work of genius we recognise our own
rejected thoughts. They come back to us with
a certain alienated majesty." Emerson, who
also said : " I believe in the still, small voice,
and that voice is the Christ within me." It was
he of whom the famous Father Taylor in Bos-
ton said : " It may be that Emerson is going to
hell, but of one thing I am certain: he will
change the climate there and emigration will
set that way."

So thought Jefferson, who said : " I have
sworn eternal hostility to every form of
tyranny over the minds of men." And as he,
great prophet, with his own hand penned that
immortal document — the Declaration of Amer-
ican Independence— one can almost imagine
the Galilean prophet standing at his shoulder

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 139

and saying: Thomas, I think it well to write
it so. Both had a burning indignation for that
species of self-seeking either on the part of an
individual or an organisation that would seek
to enchain the minds and thereby the lives
of men and women, and even lay claim to their
children. Yet Jefferson in his time was fre-
quently called an atheist — and merely because
men in those days did not distinguish as clearly
as we do today between ecclesiasticism and
religion, between formulated and essential
Christianity.

So we are brought back each time to
Jesus' two fundamentals — and these come out
every time foursquare with the best thought
of our time. The religion of Jesus is thereby
prevented from being a mere tribal religion.
It is prevented from being merely an organi-
sation that could possibly have his sanction as
such — that is, an organisation that would be
able to say: This is his, and this only. It
makes it have a world-wide and eternal con-
tent. The Kingdom that Jesus taught is in-
finitely broader in its scope and its inclusive-
ness than any organisation can be, or that all
organisations combined can be.

IX

HIS PURPOSE OF LIFTING UP, ENERGIS-
ING, BEAUTIFYING, AND SAVING THE
ENTIRE LIFE: THE SAVING OF
THE SOUL IS SECONDARY;
BUT FOLLOWS

We have made the statement that Jesus did
unusual things, but that he did them on ac-
count of, or rather by virtue of, his unusual in-
sight into and understanding of the laws
whereby they could be done. His understand-
ing of the powers of the mind and spirit was
intuitive and very great. As an evidence of
this were his numerous cases of healing the
sick and the afflicted.

Intuitively he perceived the existence and
the nature of the subjective mind, and in con-
nection with it the tremendous powers of sug-
gestion. Intuitively he was able to read, to
diagnose the particular ailment and the cause
of the ailment before him. His thought was
so poised that it was energised by a subtle and
peculiar spiritual power. Such confidence did
his personality and his power inspire in others
that he was able to an unusual degree to reach
and to arouse the slumbering subconsious mind
140

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 141

of the sufferer and to arouse into action its
own slumbering powers whereby the life force
of the body could transcend and remould its
error-ridden and error-stamped condition.

In all these cases he worked through the
operation of law — it is exactly what we know
of the laws of suggestion today. The remark-
able cases of healing that are being accom-
plished here and there among us today are
done unquestionably through the understand-
ing and use of the same laws that Jesus was
the supreme master of.

By virtue of his superior insight — his un-
derstanding of the laws of the mind and spirit
— he was able to use them so fully and so
effectively that he did in many cases elimi-
nate the element of time in his healing
ministrations. But even he was dependent in
practically all cases, upon the mental co-opera-
tion of the one who would be healed. Where
this was full and complete he succeeded ; where
it was not he failed. Such at least again and
again is the statement in the accounts that
we have of these facts in connection with his
life and work. There were places where
we are told he could do none of his mighty
works on account of their unbelief, and he de-
parted from these places and went elsewhere.
Many times his question was : " Believe ye
that I am able to do this?' Then: "Accord-

i4a HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ing to your faith be it unto you," and the
healing was accomplished.

The laws of mental and spiritual thera-
peutics are identically the same today as they
were in the days of Jesus and his disciples, who
made the healing of sick bodies a part of their
ministration. It is but fair to presume from
the accounts that we have that in the early
Church of the Disciples, and for well on to two
hundred years after Jesus' time, the healing
of the sick and the afflicted went hand in hand
with the preaching and the teaching of the
Kingdom. There are those who believe that
it never should have been abandoned. As a
well-known writer has said : " Healing is the
outward and practical attestation of the power
and genuineness of spiritual religion, and
ought not to have dropped out of the Church."
Recent sincere efforts to re-establish it in
church practice, following thereby the Mas-
ter's injunction, is indicative of the thought
that is alive in connection with the matter to-
day.* From the accounts that we have Jesus

* The Emmanuel Movement in Boston in connec-
tion with Emmanuel Church, inaugurated some time
ago under the leadership and direction of two well-
known ministers, Dr. Worcester and Dr. McComb,
and a well-known physician, Dr. Coriat, and similar
movements in other cities is an attestation of this.

That most valuable book under the joint author-
ship of these three men: "Religion and Medicine,"

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 143

seems to have engaged in works of healing
more during his early than during his later
ministry. He may have used it as a means to
an end. On account of his great love and
sympathy for the physical sufferer as well as
for the moral sufferer, it is but reasonable to
suppose that it was an integral part of his an-
nounced purpose — the saving of the life, of
the entire life, for usefulness, for service, for
happiness.

And so we have this young Galilean prophet,
coming from an hitherto unknown Jewish
family in the obscure little village of Nazareth,
giving obedience in common with his four
brothers and his sisters to his father and his
mother; but by virtue of a supreme aptitude
for and an irresistible call to the things of
the spirit — made irresistible through his over-
whelming love for the things of the spirit —
he is early absorbed by the realisation of the
truth that God is his father and that all men
are brothers.

The thought that God is his father and that
he bears a unique and filial relationship to God
so possesses him that he is filled, permeated

Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, will be found
of absorbing interest and of great practical value by
many. The amount of valuable as well as interest-
ing and reliable material that it contains is indeed
remarkable.

144 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

with the burning desire to make this newborn
message of truth and thereby of righteousness
known to the world.

His own native religion, once vibrating
through the souls of the prophets as the voice
of God, has become so obscured, so hedged
about, so killed by dogma, by ceremony, by
outward observances, that it has become a
mean and pitiable thing, and produces mean
and pitiable conditions in the lives of his peo-
ple. The institution has become so overgrown
that the spirit has gone. But God finds an-
other prophet, clearly and supremely open to
His spirit, and Jesus comes as the Messiah, the
Divine Son of God, the Divine Son of Man,
bringing to the earth a new Dispensation. It
is the message of the Divine Fatherhood of
God, God whose controlling character is love,
and with it the Divine sonship of man. An
integral part of it is — all men are brothers.

He comes as the teacher of a new, a higher
righteousness. He brings the message and he
expounds the message of the Kingdom of God.
All men he teaches must repent and turn from
their sins, and must henceforth live in this
Kingdom. It is an inner kingdom. Men shall
not say: Behold it is here or it is there; for,
behold, it is within you. God is your father
and God longs for your acknowledgment of
Him as your father; He longs for your love

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 145

even as He loves you. You are children of
God, but you are not true Sons of God until
through desire the Divine rule and life be-
comes supreme in your minds and hearts. It
is thus that you will find the Kingdom of God.
When you do, then your every act will show
forth in accordance with this Divine ideal and
guide, and the supreme law of conduct in your
lives will be love for your neighbour, for all
mankind. Through this there will then in
time become actualised the Kingdom of
Heaven on the earth.

He comes in no special garb, no millinery,
no brass bands, no formulas, no dogmas, no
organisation other than the Kingdom, to up-
hold and become a slave to, and in turn be
absorbed by, as was the organisation that he
found strangling all religion in the lives of
his people and which he so bitterly condemned.
What he brought was something infinitely
transcending this — the Kingdom of God and
His righteousness, to which all men were heirs
—equal heirs — and thereby redemption from
their sins, therefore salvation, the saving of
their lives, would be the inevitable result of
their acknowledgment of and allegiance to the
Divine rule.

How he embraced all — such human sympa-
thy— coming not to destroy but to fulfil; not
to judge the world but to save the world.

146 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

How he loved the children! How he loved to
have them about him! How he loved their
simplicity, and native integrity of mind and
heart ! Hear him as he says : " Verily I say
unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the
Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not
enter therein " ; and again : " Suffer the little
children to come unto me, and forbid them
not ; for of such is the Kingdom of God." The
makers of dogma, in evolving some three hun-
dred years later on the dogma of the inherent
sinfulness and degradation of the human life
and soul, could certainly find not the slightest
trace of any basis for it again in these words
and acts of Jesus.

We find him sympathising with and min-
gling with and seeking to draw unto the way of
his own life the poor, the outcast, the sinner,
the same as the well-to-do arid those of station
and influence — seeking to draw all through
love and knowledge to the Father.

There is a sense of justice and righteousness
in his soul, however, that balks at oppression,
injustice, and hypocrisy. He therefore con-
demns and in scathing terms those and only
those who would seek to place any barrier be-
tween the free soul of any man and his God,
iwho would bind either the mind or the con-
science of man to any prescribed formulas or
dogmas. Honouring, therefore the forms that

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 147

his intelligence and his conscience allowed
him to honour, he disregarded those that they
did not.

Like other good Jewish rabbis, for he was
looked upon during his ministry and often ad-
dressed as Rabbi, he taught in the synagogues
of his people; but oftener out on the hillsides
and by the lake-side, under the blue sky and
the stars of heaven. Giving due reverence to
the Law and the Prophets — the religion of his
people and his own early religion — but in
spirit and in discriminating thought so far
transcending them, that the people marvelled
at his teachings and said — surely this a prophet
come from God; no man ever spoke to us as
he speaks. By the ineffable beauty of his life
and the love and the winsomeness of his per-
sonality, and by the power of the truths that
he taught, he won the hearts of the common
people. They followed him and his following
continually increased.

Through it all, however, he incurred the in-
creasing hostility and the increasing hatred
of the leaders, the hierarchy of the existing
religious organisation. They were animated
by a double motive, that of protecting them-
selves, and that of protecting their established
religion. But in their slavery to the organisa-
tion, and because unable to see that it was
the spirit of true religion that he brought and

i48 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

taught, they cruelly put him to death — the
same as the organisation established later on
in his name, put numbers of God's true proph-
ets, Jesus' truest disciples to death, and essen-
tially for the same reasons.

Jesus' quick and almost unerring perception
enabled him to foresee this. It did not deter
him from going forward with his message,
standing resolutely and superbly by his reve-
lation, and at the last almost courting death —
feeling undoubtedly that the sealing of his rev-
elation and message with his very life blood
would but serve to give it its greatest power
and endurance. Heroically he met the fate
that he perceived was conspiring to end his
career, to wreck his teachings and his influ-
ence. He went forth to die clear-sighted and
unafraid.

He died for the sake of the truth of the mes-
sage that he lived and so diligently and hero-
ically laboured for — the message of the in-
effable love of God for all His children and
the bringing of them into the Father's King-
dom. And we must believe from his whole
life's teaching, not to save their souls from
some future punishment; not through any de-
mand of satisfaction on the part of God; not
as any substitutionary sacrifice to appease the
demands of an angry God — for it was the ex-
act opposite of this that his whole life teach-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 149

ing endeavoured to make known. It was su-
premely the love of the Father and His longing
for the love and allegiance, therefore the com-
plete life and service of His children. It was
the beauty of holiness — the beauty of whole-
ness— the wholeness of life, the saving of the
whole life from the sin and sordidness of self
and thereby giving supreme satisfaction to
God. It was love, not fear. If not, then al-
most in a moment he changed the entire pur-
pose and content, the entire intent of all his
previous life work. This is unthinkable.

In his last act he did not abrogate his own
expressed statement, that the very essence of
his message was expressed, as love to God and
love to one's neighbour. He did not abrogate
his continually repeated declaration that it
was the Kingdom of God and His righteous-
ness, which brings man's life into right rela-
tions with God and into right relations with
his fellow-men, that it was his purpose to re-
veal and to draw all men to, thereby aiding
God's eternal purpose — to establish in this
world a state which he designated the King-
dom of Heaven wherein a social order of
brotherliness and justice, wrought and main-
tained through the potency of love, would pre-
vail. In doing this he revealed the character
of God by being himself an embodiment of it.

It was the power of a truth that was to save

i5o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the life that he was always concerned with.
Therefore his statement that the Son of Man
has come that men might have life and might
have it more abundantly — to save men from
sin and from failure, and secondarily from
their consequences; to make them true Sons
of God and fit subjects and fit workers in His
Kingdom. Conversion according to Jesus is
the fact of this Divine rule in the mind and
heart whereby the life is saved — the saving
of the soul follows. It is the direct concomi-
tant of the saved life.

In his death he sealed his own statement:
" The law and the prophets were until John ;
since that time the Kingdom of God is
preached, and every man presseth into it."
Through his death he sealed the message of
his life when putting it in another form he
said : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
heareth my word and believeth on Him that
sent me hath everlasting life, and shall not
come into condemnation: but is passed from
death unto life."

In this majestic life divinity and humanity
meet. Here is the incarnation. The first of
the race consciously, vividly, and fully to
realise that God incarnates Himself and has
His abode in the hearts and the lives of men,
the first therefore to realise his Divine Son-
ship and become able thereby to reveal and to

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 151

teach the Divine Fatherhood of God and the
Divine Sonship of Man.

In this majestic life is the atonement, the
realisation of the at-one-ment of the Divine in
the human, made manifest in his own life and
in the way that he taught, sealed then by his
own blood.

In this majestic life we have the mediator,
the medium or connector of the Divine and the
human. In it we have the Saviour, the very
incarnation of the truth that he taught, and
that lifts the minds and thereby the lives of
men up to their Divine ideal and pattern, that
redeems their lives from the sordidness and
selfishness and sin of the hitherto purely ma-
terial self, and that being thereby saved, makes
them fit subjects for the Father's Kingdom.

In this majestic life is the full embodiment
of the beauty of holiness — whose words have
gone forth and whose spirit is ceaselessly at
work in the world, drawing men and women
up to their divine ideal, and -that will continue
so to draw all in proportion as his words of
truth and his life are lifted up throughout the
world.

X

SOME METHODS OF ATTAINMENT

After this study of the teachings of the Di-
vine Master let us know this. It is the ma-
terial that is the transient, the temporary;
and the mental and spiritual that is the real
and the eternal. We must not become slaves
to habit. The material alone can never bring
happiness — much less satisfaction. These lie
deeper. That conversation between Jesus and
the rich young man is full of significance for
us all, especially in this ambitious, striving,
restless age.

Abundance of life is determined not alone
by one's material possessions, but primarily by
one's riches of mind and spirit. A world of
truth is contained in these words : " Life is
what we are alive to. It is not a length, but
breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleas-
ure, mere luxury or idleness, pride or money-
making, and not to goodness and kindness,
purity and love, history, poetry, and music,
flowers, God and eternal hopes, is to be all
but dead."

Why be so eager to gain possession of the

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 153

hundred thousand or the half-million acres,
of so many millions of dollars? Soon, and it
may be before you realise it, all must be left.
It is as if a man made it his ambition to ac-
cumulate a thousand or a hundred thousand
automobiles. All soon will become junk. But
so it is with all material things beyond
what we can actually and profitably use for
our good and the good of others — and that we
actually do so use.

A man can eat just so many meals during
the year or during life. If he tries to eat more
he suffers thereby. He can wear only so many
suits of clothing ; if he tries to wear more, he
merely wears himself out taking off and put-
ting on. Again it is as Jesus said : " For what
shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole
world and lose his own life? " And right there
is the crux of the whole matter. All the time
spent in accumulating these things beyond the
reasonable amount, is so much taken from
the life — from the things of the mind and the
spirit. It is in the development and the pur-
suit of these that all true satisfaction lies.
Elemental law has so decreed.

We have made wonderful progress, or rather
have developed wonderful skill in connection
with things. We need now to go back and
catch up the thread and develop like skill in
making the life.

154 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

Little wonder that brains are addled, that
nerves are depleted, that nervous dyspepsia,
that chronic weariness, are not the exception
but rather the rule. Little wonder that sani-
tariums are always full; that asylums are full
and overflowing — and still more to be built.
No wonder that so many men, so many good
men break and go to pieces, and so many lose
the life here at from fifty to sixty years, when
they should be in the very prime of life, in the
full vigour of manhood ; at the very age when
they are capable of enjoying life the most
and are most capable of rendering the
greatest service to their fellows, to their
community, because of greater growth, ex-
perience, means, and therefore leisure. Jesus
was right— What doth it profit? And think
of the real riches that in the meantime are
missed.

It is like an addled-brain driver in making
a trip across the continent. He is possessed,
obsessed with the insane desire of making a
record. He plunges on and on night and day,
good weather and foul — and all the time he is
missing all the beauties, all the benefits to
health and spirit along the way. He has none
of these when he arrives — he has missed them
all. He has only the fact that he has made a
record drive — or nearly made one. And those
with him he has not only robbed of the beau-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 155

ties along the way; but he has subjected
them to all the discomforts along the way.
And what really underlies the making of
a record? It is primarily the spirit of
vanity.

When the mental beauties of life, when the
spiritual verities are sacrificed by self-surren-
der to and domination by the material, one of
the heavy penalties that inexorable law im-
poses is the drying up, so to speak, of the finer
human perceptions — the very faculties of en-
joyment. It presents to the world many times,
and all unconscious to himself, a stunted,
shrivelled human being — that eternal type that
the Master had in mind when he said : " Thou
fool, this night shall thy soul be required of
thee." He whose sole employment or even
whose primary employment becomes the build-
ing of bigger and still bigger barns to take
care of his accumulated grain, becomes in-
capable of realising that life and the things
that pertain to it are of infinitely more value
than barns, or houses, or acres, or stocks, or
bonds, or railroad ties. These all have their
place, all are of value; but they can never be
made the life. A recent poem by James Op-
penheim presents a type that is known to
nearly every one : *

*"War and Laughter," by James Oppenheim —
The Century Company, New York.

iS6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

I heard the preacher preaching at the funeral:
He moved the relatives to tears telling them

of the father, husband, and friend that was

dead:

Of the sweet memories left behind him:
Of a life that was good and kind.

I happened to know the man,
And I wondered whether the relatives would
have wept if the preacher had told the truth :
Let us say like this:

"The only good thing this man ever did in his
life,

Was day before yesterday:

He died . . .

But he didn't even do that of his own voli-
tion . . .

He was the meanest man in business on Man-
hattan Island,

The most treacherous friend, the crudest and
stingiest husband,

And a father so hard that his children left
home as soon as they were old enough . . .

Of course he had divinity: everything human
has:

But he kept it so carefully hidden away that he
might just as well not have had it ...

" Wife ! good cheer ! now you can go your own
way and live your own life!

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 157

Children, give praise! you have his money:
the only good thing he ever gave you . . .

Friends! you have one less traitor to deal
with . . .

This is indeed a day of rejoicing and exulta-
tion!

Thank God this man is dead ! "

An unknown enjoyment and profit to him
is the world's great field of literature, the
world's great thinkers, the inspirers of so
many through all the ages. That splendid
verse by Emily Dickinson means as much to
him as it would to a dumb stolid ox:

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust,
He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was dust;
He danced along the dingy days,

And this bequest of wings
Was but a book ! What liberty

A loosened spirit brings!

Yes, life and its manifold possibilities of un-
foldment and avenues of enjoyment — life, and
the things that pertain to it — is an infinitely
greater thing than the mere accessories of life.

What infinite avenues of enjoyment, what
peace of mind, what serenity of soul may be

158 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the possession of all men and all women who
are alive to the inner possibilities of life as por-
trayed by our own prophet, Emerson, when
he said:

Oh, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and pride of man,
At the Sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

It was he who has exerted such a world-wide
influence upon the minds and lives of men and
women who also said : " Great men are they
who see that spirituality is stronger than any
material force: that thoughts rule the world."
And this is true not only of the world in gen-
eral, but it is true likewise in regard to the
individual life.

One of the great secrets of all successful
living is unquestionably the striking of the
right balance in life. The material has its
place — and a very important place. Fools in-
deed were we to ignore or to attempt to ig-
nore this fact. We cannot, however, except
to our detriment, put the cart before the
horse. Things may contribute to happiness,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 159

but things cannot bring happiness — and sad
indeed, and crippled and dwarfed and stunted
becomes the life of every one who is not capa-
ble of realising this fact. Eternally true in-
deed is it that the life is more than meat and
the body more than raiment.

All life is from an inner centre outward.
As within, so without. As we think we be-
come. Which means simply this: our pre-
vailing thoughts and emotions are never static,
but dynamic. Thoughts are forces — like cre-
ates like, and like attracts like. It is therefore
for us to choose whether we shall be inter-
ested primarily in the great spiritual forces
and powers of life, or whether we shall be in-
terested solely in the material things of life.

But there is a wonderful law which we must
not lose sight of. It is to the effect that when
we become sufficiently alive to the inner pow-
ers and forces, to the inner springs of life, the
material things of life will not only follow in a
natural and healthy sequence, but they will
also assume their right proportions. They will
take their right places.

It was the recognition of this great funda-
mental fact of life that Jesus had in mind when
he said: "But rather seek ye the kingdom of
God; and all these things shall be added unto
you," — meaning, as he so distinctly stated, the
kingdom of the mind and spirit made open and

160 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

translucent to the leading of the Divine Wis-
dom inherent in the human soul, when that
leading is sought and when through the right
ordering of the mind we make the conditions
whereby it may become operative in the in-
dividual life.

The great value of God as taught by Jesus
is that God dwells in us. It is truly Emman-
uel— God with us. The law must be observed
— the conditions must be met. " The Lord is
with you while ye be with him; and if ye will
seek him, he will be found of you." " The
spirit of the living God dwelleth in you." " If
any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God,
that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth
not; and it shall be given him. But let him
ask in faith, nothing wavering." That there
is a Divine law underlying prayer that helps
to release the inner springs of wisdom, which
in turn leads to power, was well known to
Jesus, for his life abundantly proved it.

His great aptitude for the things of the spirit
enabled him intuitively to realise this, to un-
derstand it, to use it. And there was no mys-
tery, no secret, no subterfuge on the part of
Jesus as to the source of his power. In clear
and unmistakable words he made it known —
and why should he not? It was the truth,
the truth of this inner kingdom that would
make men free that he came to reveal. " The

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 161

words that I speak unto you I speak not of
myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me,
he doeth the works." " My Father worketh
hitherto and I work. . . . For as the Father
hath life in himself; so hath he given to the
Son to have life in himself. ... I can of mine
own self do nothing." As he followed the con-
ditions whereby this higher illumination can
come so must we.

The injunction that Jesus gave in regard to
prayer is unquestionably the method that he
found so effective and that he himself used.
How many times we are told that he withdrew
to the mountain for his quiet period, for com-
munion with the Father, that the realisation
of his oneness with God might be preserved
intact. In this continual realisation — I and my
Father are one — lay his unusual insight and
power. And his distinct statement which he
made in speaking of his own powers — as I am
ye shall be — shows clearly the possibilities of
human unfoldment and attainment, since he
realised and lived and then revealed the way.

Were not this Divine source of wisdom and
power the heritage of every human soul, dis-
tinctly untrue then would be Jesus' saying:
" For every one that asketh, receiveth ; and he
that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knock-
eth, it shall be opened." Infinitely better is it
to know that one has this inner source of

162 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

guidance and wisdom which as he opens himself
to it becomes continually more distinct, more
clear and more unerring in its guidance, than
to be continually seeking advice from outside
sources, and being confused in regard to the
advice given. This is unquestionably the way
of the natural and the normal life, made so
simple and so plain by Jesus, and that was
foreshadowed by Isaiah when he said : " Hast
thou not known? Hast thou not heard that
the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of
the ends of the earth fainteth not, neither is
weary? He giveth power to the faint and to
them that have no might he increaseth
strength. Even the youths shall faint and be
weary, and the young men shall utterly fall.
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew
their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be
weary; they shall walk, and not faint."

Not that problems and trials will not come.
They will come. There never has been and
there never will be a life free from them. Life
isn't conceivable on any other terms. But the
wonderful source of consolation and strength,
the source that gives freedom from worry and
freedom from fear is the realisation of the fact
that the guiding force and the moulding power
is within us. It becomes active and controll-
ing in the degree that we realise and in the de-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 163

gree that we are able to open ourselves so
that the Divine intelligence and power can
speak to and can work through us.

Judicious physical exercise induces greater
bodily strength and vigour. An active and
alert mental life, in other words mental ac-
tivity, induces greater intellectual power. And
under the same general law the same is true
in regard to the development and the use of
spiritual power. It, however, although the
most important of all because it has to do more
fundamentally with the life itself, we are most
apt to neglect. The losses, moreover, result-
ing from this neglect are almost beyond cal-
culation.

To establish one's centre aright is to make
all of life's activities and events and results
flow from this centre in orderly sequence. A
modern writer of great insight has said : " The
understanding that God is, and all there is,
will establish you upon a foundation from
which you can never be moved." To know
that the power that is God is the power that
works in us is knowledge of transcendent im-
port.

To know that the spirit of Infinite wisdom
and power which is the creating, the moving,
and the sustaining force in all life, thinks and
acts in and through us as our own very life,
in the degree that we consciously and delib-

164 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

erately desire it to become the guiding and the
animating force in our lives, and open our-
selves fully to its leadings, and follow its lead-
ings, is to attain to that state of conscious
oneness with the Divine that Jesus realised,
lived and revealed, and that he taught as the
method of the natural and the normal life for
all men.

We are so occupied with the matters of the
sense-life that all unconsciously we become
dominated, ruled by the things of the senses.
Now in the real life there is the recognition
of the fact that the springs of life are all
from within, and that the inner always leads
and rules the outer. Under the elemental law
of Cause and Effect this is always done —
whether we are conscious of it or not. But
the difference lies here: The master of life
consciously and definitely allies himself in
mind and spirit with the great central Force
and rules his world from within. The creature
of circumstances, through lack of desire or
through weakness of will, fails to do this, and,
lacking guiding and directing force, drifts and
becomes thereby the creature of circumstance.

One of deep insight has said : " That we do
not spontaneously see and know God, as we
see and know one another, and so manifest
the God-nature as we do the sense-nature, is
because that nature is yet latent, and in a

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 165

sense slumbering within us. Yet the God-
nature within us connects us as directly and
vitally with the Being and Kingdom of God
within, behind, and above the world, as does
the sense-nature with the world external to us.
Hence as the sense-consciousness was awak-
ened and established by the recognition of and
communication with the outward world
through the senses, so the God-consciousness
must be awakened by the corresponding recog-
nition of, and communication with the Being
and Kingdom of God through intuition — the
spiritual sense of the inner man. . . . Tke true
prayer — the prayer of silence — is the only door
that opens the soul to the direct revelation of
God, and brings thereby the realisation of the
God-nature in ourselves."

As the keynote to the world of sense is
activity, so the keynote to spiritual light and
power is quiet. The individual consciousness
must be brought into harmony with the Cos-
mic consciousness. Paul speaks of the " sons
of God." And in a single sentence he describes
what he means by the term — " For as many
as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
sons of God." An older prophet has said:
" The Lord in the midst of thee is mighty."
Jesus with his deep insight perceived the iden-
tity of his real life with the Divine life, the in-
dwelling Wisdom and Power, — the " Father

166 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

in me." The whole course of his ministry was
his attempt " to show those who listened to
him how he was related to the Father, and to
teach them that they were related to the same
Father in exactly the same way."

There is that within man that is illumined
and energised through the touch of His spirit.
We can bring our minds into rapport, into such
harmony and connection with the infinite Di-
vine mind that it speaks in us, directs us, and
therefore acts through us as our own selves.
Through this connection we become illumined
by Divine wisdom and we become energised
by Divine power. It is ours, then, to act un-
der the guidance of this higher wisdom and
in all forms of expression to act and to work
augmented by this higher power. The finite
spirit, with all its limitations, becomes at its
very centre in rapport with Infinite spirit, its
Source. The finite thereby becomes the chan-
nel through which the Infinite can and does
work.

To use an apt figure, it is the moving of the
switch whereby we connect our wires as it
were with the central dynamo which is the
force that animates, that gives and sustains
life in the universe. It is making actual the
proposition that was enunciated by Emerson
when he said : " Every soul is not only the
inlet, but may become the outlet of all there

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 167

is in God." Significant also in this connection
is his statement : " The only sin is limitation."
It is the actualising of the fact that in Him
we live and move and have our being, with its
inevitable resultant that we become " strong
in the Lord and in the power of His might."
There is perhaps no more valuable way of
realising this end, than to adopt the practice
of taking a period each day for being alone
in the quiet, a half hour, even a quarter hour;
stilling the bodily senses and making oneself
receptive to the higher leadings of the spirit
— receptive to the impulses of the soul. This
is following the master's practice and example
of communion with the Father. Things in
this universe and in human life do not happen.
All is law and sequence. The elemental law
of cause and effect is universal and unvarying.
In the realm of spirit law is as definite as
in the realm of mechanics — in the realm of all
material forces.

If we would have the leading of the spirit,
if we would perceive the higher intuitions and
be led intuitively, bringing the affairs of the
daily life thereby into the Divine sequence, we
must observe the conditions whereby these
leadings can come to us, and in time become
habitual.

The law of the spirit is quiet — to be fol-
lowed by action — but quiet, the more readily

168 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

to come into a state of harmony with the In-
finite Intelligence that works through us, and
that leads us as our own intelligence when
through desire and through will, we are able
to bring our subconscious minds into such
attunement that it can act through us, and we
are able to catch its messages and follow its
direction. But to listen and to observe the
conditions whereby we can listen is essential.

Jesus' own words as well as his practice
apply here. After his admonition against
public prayer, or prayer for show, or prayer
of much speaking, he said : " But thou, when
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when
thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father
which is in secret ; and thy Father which seeth
in secret, shall reward thee openly." Now
there are millions of men, women, and chil-
dren in the world who have no closets. There
are great numbers of others who have no
access to them sometimes for days, or weeks,
or months at a time. It is evident, therefore,
that in the word that has been rendered closet
he meant — enter into the quiet recesses of
your own soul that you may thus hold com-
munion with the Father.

Now the value of prayer is not that God
will change or order any laws or forces to
suit the numerous and necessarily the diverse
petitions of any. All things are through law,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 169

and law is fixed and inexorable. The value of
prayer, of true prayer, is that through it one
can so harmonise his life with the Divine
order that intuitive perceptions of truth and
a greater perception and knowledge of law
becomes his possession. As has been said by
an able contemporary thinker and writer:
" We cannot form a passably thorough notion
of man without saturating it through and
through with the idea of a cosmic inflow from
outside his world life — the inflow of God.
Without a large consciousness of the universe
beyond our knowledge, few men, if any, have
done great things.*

I shall always remember with great pleasure
and profit a call a few days ago from Dr.
Edward Emerson of Concord, Emerson's
eldest son. Happily I asked him in regard
to his father's methods of work — if he had any
regular methods. He replied in substance:
" It was my father's custom to go daily to the
woods — to listen. He would remain there an
hour or more in order to get whatever there
might be for him that day. He would then
come home and write into a little book — his
' day-book ' — what he had gotten. Later on
when it came time to write a book, he would
transcribe from this, in their proper sequence
and with their proper connections, these en-

* Henry Holt in "Cosmic Relations."

170 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

trances of the preceding weeks or months.
The completed book became virtually a ledger
formed or posted from his day-books."

The prophet is he who so orders his life that
he can adequately listen to the voice, the
revelations of the over soul, and who truthfully
transcribes what he hears or senses. He is
not a follower of custom or of tradition. He
can never become and can never be made the
subservient tool of an organisation. His aim
and his mission is rather to free men from
ignorance, superstition, credulity, from half
truths, by leading them into a continually
larger understanding of truth, of law — and
therefore of righteousness.

It was more than a mere poetic idea that
Lowell gave utterance to when he said:

The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.

To establish this connection, to actualise
this God-consciousness, that it may not be for
one transcendent moment, but that it may be-
come constant and habitual, so that every
thought arises, and so that every act goes
forth from this centre, is the greatest good that
can come into the possession of man. There is
nothing greater. It is none other than the
realisation of Jesus' injunction — " Seek ye first

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 171

the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you."
It is then that he said — Do not worry about
your life. Your mind and your will are under
the guidance of the Divine mind; your every
act goes out under this direction and all things
pertaining to your life will fall into their proper
places. Therefore do not worry about your
life.

When a man finds his centre, when he be-
comes centred in the Infinite, then redemption
takes place. He is redeemed from the bond-
age of the senses. He lives thereafter under
the guidance of the spirit, and this is salvation.
It is a new life that he has entered into. He
lives in a new world, because his outlook is
entirely new. He is living now in the King-
dom of Heaven. Heaven means harmony.
He has brought his own personal mind and
life into harmony with the Divine mind and
life. He becomes a coworker with God.

It is through such men and women that
God's plans and purposes are carried out.
They not only hear but they interpret for
others God's voice. They are the prophets of
our time and the prophets of all time. They
are doing God's work in the world, and in so
doing they are finding their own supreme sat-
isfaction and happiness. They are not looking
forward to the Eternal life. They realise that

172 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

they are *iow in the Eternal life, and that there
is no such thing as eternal life if this life that
we are now in is not it. When the time comes
for them to stop their labours here, they look
forward without fear and with anticipation to
the change, the transition to the other form
of life — but not to any other life. The words
of Whitman embody a spirit of anticipation
and of adventure for them:

Joy, Shipmate, joy!
(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry)
One life is closed, one life begun,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps.

Joy, Shipmate, joy!

They have an abiding faith that they will
take up the other form of life exactly where
they left it off here. Being in heaven now
they will be in heaven when they awake to the
continuing beauties of the life subsequent to
their transition. Such we might also say is
the teaching of Jesus regarding the highest
there is in life here and the best there is in the
life hereafter.

XI

SOME METHODS OF EXPRESSION

The life of the Spirit, or, in other words,
the true religious life, is not a life of mere
contemplation or a life of inactivity. As
Fichte, in "The Way Toward the Blessed
Life," has said : " True religion, notwithstand-
ing that it raises the view of those who are in-
spired by it to its own region, nevertheless,
retains their Life firmly in the domain of ac-
tion, and of right moral action. . . . Religion
is not a business by and for itself which a
man may practise apart from his other occupa-
tions, perhaps on certain fixed days and hours ;
but it is the inmost spirit that penetrates, in-
spires, and pervades all our Thought and Ac-
tion, which in other respects pursue their ap-
pointed course without change or interruption.
That the Divine Life and Energy actually lives
in us is inseparable from Religion."

How thoroughly this is in keeping with the

thought of the highly illumined seer, Sweden-

borg, is indicated when he says : " The Lord's

Kingdom is a Kingdom of ends and uses."

173

174 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

And again : " Forsaking the world means lov-
ing God and the neighbour; and God is loved
when a man lives according to His command-
ments, and the neighbour is loved when a man
performs uses." And still again : " To be of
use means to desire the welfare of others for
the sake of the common good; and not to be
of use means to desire the welfare of others
not for the sake of the common good but for
one's own sake. ... In order that man may
receive heavenly life he must live in the world
and engage in its business and occupations,
and thus by a moral and civil life acquire spir-
itual life. In no other way can spiritual life
be generated in man, or his spirit be prepared
for heaven."

We hear much today both in various writ-
ings and in public utterances of " the spiritual "
and " the spiritual life." I am sure that to
the great majority of men and women the term
spiritual, or better, the spiritual life, means
something, but something by no means fully
tangible or clear-cut. I shall be glad indeed
if I am able to suggest a more comprehensible
concept of it, or putting it in another form
and better perhaps, to present a more clear-
cut portraiture of the spiritual life in expres-
sion— in action.

And first let us note that in the mind and in
the teachings of Jesus there is no such thing as

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 175

the secular life and the religious life. His
ministry pertained to every phase of life. The
truth that he taught was a truth that was to
permeate every thought and every act of life.

We make our arbitrary divisions. We are
too apt to deny the fact that the Lord is the
Lord of the week-day, the same as He is the
Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus refused to be
bound by any such consideration. He taught
that every act that is a good act, every act
that is of service to mankind is not only
a legitimate act to be done on the Sabbath
day, but an act that should be performed on
the Sabbath day. And any act that is not
right and legitimate for the Sabbath day is
neither right nor legitimate for the week-day.
In other words, it is the spirit of righteousness
that must permeate and must govern every act
of life and every moment of life.

In seeking to define the spiritual life, it were
better to regard the world as the expression
of the Divine mind. The spirit is the life ; the
world and all things in it, the material to be
moulded, raised, and transmuted from the
lower to the higher. This is indeed the law of
evolution, that has been through all the ages
and that today is at work. It is the God-Power
that is at work and every form of useful ac-
tivity that helps on with this process of lifting
and bettering is a form of Divine activity.

176 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

If therefore we recognise the one Divine
life working in and through all, the animating
force, therefore the Life of all, and if we are
consciously helping in this process we are
spiritual men.

No man of intelligence can fail to recog-
nise the fact that life is more important
than things. Life is the chief thing, and
material things are the elements that min-
ister to, that serve the purposes of the life,
Whoever does anything in the world to pre-
serve life, to better its conditions, who, recog-
nising the Divine force at work lifting life up
always to better, finer conditions, is doing
God's work in the world — because cooperating
with the great Cosmic world plan.

The ideal, then, is men and women of the
spirit, open and responsive always to its guid-
ance, recognising the Divine plan and the
Divine ideal, working cooperatively in the
world to make all conditions of life fairer,
finer, more happy. He who lives and works
not as an individual, that is not for his good
alone, but who recognises the essential oneness
of life — is carrying out his share of the Divine
plan.

A man may be unusually gifted ; he may have
unusual ability in business, in administration;
he may be a giant in finance, in administration,
ibut if for self alone, if lack of vision blinds

him to the great Divine plan, if he does not
recognise his relative place and value; if he
gains his purposes by selfishness, by climbing
over others, by indifference to human pain or
suffering — oblivious to human welfare — his
ways are the ways of the jungle. His mind
and his life are purely sordid, grossly and
blindly self-centred — wholly material. He
gains his object, but by Divine law not happi-
ness, not satisfaction, not peace. He is outside
the Kingdom of Heaven — the kingdom of har-
mony. He is living and working out of har-
mony with the Divine mind that is evolving
a higher order of life in the world. He is
blind too, he is working against the Divine
plan.

Now what is the Divine call? Can he be
made into a spiritual man? Yes. A different
understanding, a different motive, a different
object — then will follow a difference in
methods. Instead of self alone he will have a
sense of, he will have a call to service. And
this man, formerly a hinderer in the Divine
plan, becomes a spiritual giant. His splendid
powers and his qualities do not need to be
changed. Merely his motives and thereby his
methods, and he is changed into a giant engine
of righteousness. He is a part of the great
world force and plan. He is doing his part
in the great world work — he is a coworker

178 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

with God. And here lies salvation. Saved
from self and the dwarfed and stunted condi-
tion that will follow, his spiritual nature un-
folds and envelops his entire life. His powers
and his wealth are thereafter to bless mankind.
But behold ! by another great fundamental law
of life in doing this he is blessed ten, a hun-
dred, a millionfold.

Material prosperity is or may become a true
jjain, a veritable blessing. But it can become
a curse to the world and still more to its pos-
sessor when made an end in itself, and at the
expense of all the higher attributes and powers
of human life.

We have reason to rejoice that a great
change of estimate has not only begun but is
now rapidly creeping over the world. He of
even a generation ago who piled and piled, but
who remained ignorant of the more funda-
mental laws of life, blind to the law of mu-
tuality and service, would be regarded today
as a low, beastly type. I speak advisedly. It
is this obedience to the life of the spirit that
Whitman had in mind when he said : " And
whoever walks a furlong without sympathy
walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud."
It was the full flowering of the law of mu-
tuality and service that he saw when he said:
" I saw a city invincible to the attacks of
the whole of the rest of the earth. I dream'd

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 179

that it was the new City of Friends. Nothing
was greater there than the quality of robust
love; it led the rest. It was seen every hour
in the actions of the men of that city and in
all their looks and words." It is through
obedience to this life of the spirit that order
is brought out of chaos in the life of the
individual and in the life of the community,
in the business world, the labour world, and
in our great world relations.

But in either case, we men and women of
Christendom, to be a Christian is not only to
be good, but to be good for something. Ac-
cording to the teachings of the Master true
religion is not only personal salvation, but it
is giving one's self through all of one's best
efforts to actualise the Kingdom of Heaven
here on earth. The finding of the Kingdom
is not only personal but social and world-
affirming — and in the degree that it becomes
fully and vitally personal will it become so.

A man who is not right with his fellow-men
is not right and cannot be right with God.
This is coming to be the clear-cut realisa-
tion of all progressive religious thought today.
Since men are free from the trammels of an
enervating dogma that through fear made
them seek, or rather that made them contented
with religion as primarily a system of rewards
and punishments, they are now awakening to

i8o HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the fact that the logical carrying out of Jesus'
teaching of the Kingdom is the establishing
here on this earth of an order of life and hence
of a society where greater love and coopera-
tion and justice prevail. Our rapidly growing
present-day conception of Christianity makes
it not world-renouncing, but world-affirming.

This modern conception of the function of a
true and vital Christianity makes it the task
of the immediate future to apply Christianity
to trade, to commerce, to labour relations, to
all social relations, to international relations.
" And, in the wider field of religious thought,"
says a writer in a great international religious
paper, " what truer service can we render than
to strip theology of all that is unreal or need-
lessly perplexing, and make it speak plainly
and humanly to people who have their duty to
do and their battle to fight? " It makes in-
telligent, sympathetic, and helpful living take
the place of the tooth and the claw, the growl
and the deadly hiss of the jungle — all right in
their places, but with no place in human
living.

The growing realisation of the interde-
pendence of all life is giving a new standard
of action and attainment, and a new standard
of estimate. Jesus' criterion is coming into
more universal appreciation: He that is great-
est among you shall be as he who serves.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 181

Through this fundamental law of life there
are responsibilities that cannot be evaded or
shirked — and of him to whom much is given
much is required.

It was President Wilson who recently said:
" It is to be hoped that these obvious truths
will come to more general acceptance; that
honest business will quit thinking that it is
attacked when loaded-dice business is at-
tacked ; that the mutuality of interest between
employer and employee will receive ungrudg-
ing admission ; and, finally, that men of affairs
will lend themselves more patriotically to the
work of making democracy an efficient instru-
ment for the promotion of human welfare. It
cannot be said that they have done so in the
past. ... As a consequence, many necessary
things have been done less perfectly without
their assistance that could have been done
more perfectly with their expert aid." He is
by no means alone in recognising this fact.
Nor is he at all blind to the great change that
is already taking place.

In a recent public address in New York, the
head of one of the largest plants in the world,
and who starting with nothing has accumu-
lated a fortune of many millions, said : " The
only thing I am proud of — prouder of than
that I have amassed a great fortune — is that
I established the first manual training school

182 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

in Pennsylvania. The greatest delight of my
life is to see the advancement of the young
men who have come up about me."

This growing sense of personal responsi-
bility, and still better, of personal interest, this
giving of one's abilities and one's time, in
addition to one's means, is the beginning of the
fulfilment of what I have long thought:
namely, the great gain that will accrue to
numberless communities and to the nation,
when men of great means, men of great busi-
ness and executive ability, give of their time
and their abilities for the accomplishment of
those things for the public welfare that other-
wise would remain undone, or that would re-
main unduly delayed. What a gain will re-
sult also to those who so do in the joy and
satisfaction resulting from this higher type of
accomplishment hallowed by the undying ele-
ment of human service !

You keep silent too much. " Have great
leaders, and the rest will follow," said Whit-
man. The gift of your abilities while you live
would be of priceless worth for the establishing
and the maintenance of a fairer, a healthier,
and a sweeter life in your community, your
city, your country. It were better to do this
and to be contented with a smaller accumula-
tion than to have it so large or even so exces-
sive, and when the summons comes to leave

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 183

it to two or three or to half a dozen who can-
not possibly have good use for it all, and some
of whom perchance would be far better off
without it, or without so much. By so doing
you would be leaving something still greater
to them as well as to hundreds or thousands of
others.

Significant in this connection are these words
by a man of wealth and of great public serv-
ice: *

" On the whole, the individualistic age has
not been a success, either for the individual, or
the community in which he has lived, or the
nation. We are, beyond question, entering on
a period where the welfare of the community
takes precedence over the interests of the in-
dividual and where the liberty of the individ-
ual will be more and more circumscribed for
the benefit of the community as a whole.
Man's activities will hereafter be required to
be not only for himself but for his fellow-men.
To my mind there is nothing in the signs of
the times so certain as this.

" The man of exceptional ability, of more
than ordinary talent, will hereafter look for
his rewards, for his honours, not in one direc-

* From a notable article in the New York " Times
Magazine," Sunday, April i, 1917, by George W.
Perkins, chairman Mayor's Food Supply Commis-
sion.

i84 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

tion but in two — first, and foremost, in some
public work accomplished, and, secondarily, in
wealth acquired. In place of having it said of
him at his death that he left so many hundred
thousand dollars it will be said that he ren-
dered a certain amount of public service, and,
incidentally, left a certain amount of money.
Such a goal will prove a far greater satisfac-
tion to him, he will live a more rational, worth-
while life, and he will be doing his share to
provide a better country in which to live. We
face new conditions, and in order to survive
and succeed we shall require a different spirit
of public service."

I am well aware of the fact that the mere
accumulation of wealth is not, except in very
rare cases, the controlling motive in the lives
of our wealthy men of affairs. It is rather
the joy and the satisfaction of achievement.
But nevertheless it is possible, as has so often
proved, to get so much into a habit and
thereby into a rut, that one becomes a victim
of habit ; and the life with all its superb possi-
bilities of human service, and therefore of true
greatness, becomes side-tracked and abortive.

There are so many different lines of activity
for human betterment for children, for men
and women, that those of great executive and
financial ability have wonderful opportunities.
Greatness conies always through human serv-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 185

ice. As there is no such thing as finding
happiness by searching for it directly, so there
is no such thing as achieving greatness by
seeking it directly. It comes not primarily
through brilliant intellect, great talents, but
primarily through the heart. It is determined
by the way that brilliant intellect, great talents
are used. It is accorded not to those who seek
it directly. By an indirect law it is accorded
to those who, forgetting self, give and thereby
lose their lives in human service.

Both poet and prophet is Edwin Markham
when he says:

We men of earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise — we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The stairs into the Unfulfilled —
No other ivory for the doors —
No other marble for the floors —
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.

Here on the paths of every day —
Here on the common human way,
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a Heaven ; to mould and make
New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in timel

i86 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

This putting of divinity into life and raising
thereby an otherwise sordid life up to higher
levels and thereby to greater enjoyments, is
the power that is possessed equally by those
of station and means, and by those in the more
humble or even more lowly walks of life.

When your life is thus touched by the spirit
of God, when it is ruled by this inner King-
dom, when your constant prayer, as the prayer
of every truly religious man or woman will be
— Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? My
one desire is that Thy will be my will, and
therefore that Thy will be done in me and
through me — then you are living the Divine
life; you are a coworker with God. And
whether your life according to accepted stand-
ards be noted or humble it makes no difference
— you are fulfilling your Divine mission. You
should be, you cannot help being fearless and
happy. You are a part of the great creative
force in the world.

You are doing a man's or a woman's work
in the world, and in so doing you are not un-
important; you are essential. The joy of true
accomplishment is yours. You can look for-
ward always with sublime courage and ex-
pectancy. The life of the most humble can
thus become an exalted life. Mother, watching
over, cleaning, feeding, training, and educating
your brood ; seamstress, working, with a touch

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 187

of the Divine in all you do — it must be done
by some one — allow it to be done by none
better than by you. Farmer, tilling your soil,
gathering your crops, caring for your herds;
you are helping feed the world. There is
nothing more important.

" Who digs a well, or plants a seed,

A sacred pact he keeps with sun and sod;
With these he helps refresh and feed

The world, and enters partnership with
God."

If you do not allow yourself to become a
slave to your work, and if you cooperate
within the house and the home so that your
wife and your daughters do not become slaves
or near-slaves, what an opportunity is yours
of high thinking and noble living! The more
intelligent you become, the better read, the
greater the interest you take in community and
public affairs, the more effectively you be-
come what in reality and jointly you are — the
backbone of this and of every nation. Teacher,
poet, dramatist, carpenter, ironworker, clerk,
college head*, Mayor, Governor, President,
Ruler — the effectiveness of your work and the
satisfaction in your work will be determined
by the way in which you relate your thought
and your work to the Divine plan, and co-

i88 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ordinate your every activity in reference to the
highest welfare of the greater whole.

However dimly or clearly we may perceive
it great changes are taking place. The simple,
direct teachings of the Christ are reaching
more and more the mind, are stirring the heart
and through these are dominating the actions
of increasing numbers of men and women.
The realisation of the mutual interdependence
of the human family, the realisation of its com-
mon source, and that when one part of it goes
wrong all suffer thereby, the same as when
any portion of it advances all are lifted and
benefited thereby, makes us more eager for
the more speedy actualising of the Kingdom
that the Master revealed and portrayed.

It was Sir Oliver Lodge who in this con-
nection recently said : " Those who think that
the day of the Messiah is over are strangely
mistaken; it has hardly begun. In individual
souls Christianity has flourished and borne
fruit, but for the ills of the world itself it is
an almost untried panacea. It will be strange
if this ghastly war fosters and simplifies and
improves a knowledge of Christ, and aids a
perception of the ineffable beauty of his life
and teaching; yet stranger things have hap-
pened, and whatever the churches may do, I
believe that the call of Christ himself will be
heard and attended to by a larger part of hu-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 189

manity in the near future, as never yet it has
been heard or attended to on earth."

The simple message of the Christ, with its
twofold injunction of Love, is, when suffi-
ciently understood and sufficiently heeded, all
that we men of earth need to lift up, to beau-
tify, to make strong and Godlike individual
lives and thereby and of necessity the life of
the world. Jesus never taught that God in-
carnated Himself in him alone. I challenge
any man living to find any such teach-
ing by him. He did proclaim his own unique
realisation of God. Intuitively and vividly he
perceived the Divine life, the eternal Word, the
eternal Christ, manifesting in his clean, strong,
upright soul, so that the young Jewish rabbi
and prophet, known in all his community as
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary and whose
brothers and sisters they knew so well,* be-
came the firstborn — fully born— <>f the Father.

He then pleaded with all the energy and
love and fervour of his splendid heart and
vigorous manhood that all men should follow
the Way that he revealed and realise their
Divine Sonship, that their lives might be re-
deemed— redeemed from the bondage of^ the

* Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the
brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and
Simon? And are his sisters not here with us? —
Mark 6:3.

igo HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

bodily senses and the bondage of merely the
things of the outer world, and saved as fit sub-
jects of and workers in the Father's Kingdom.
Otherwise for millions of splendid earnest men
and women today his life-message would have
no meaning.

To make men awake to their real identity,
and therefore to their possibilities and powers
as true sons of God, the Father of all, and
therefore that all men are brothers — for other-
wise God is not Father of all — and to live to-
gether in brotherly love and mutual coopera-
tion whereby the Divine will becomes done on
earth as it is in heaven — this is his message to
we men of earth. If we believe his message
and accept his leadership, then he becomes in-
deed our elder brother who leads the way, the
Word in us becomes flesh, the Christ becomes
enthroned in our lives, — and we become co-
workers with him in the Father's vineyard.

XII

THE WORLD WAR— ITS MEANING AND ITS
LESSONS FOR US

Whatever differences of opinion — and honest
differences of opinion — may have existed and
may still exist in America in regard to the
great world conflict, there is a wonderful
unanimity of thought that has crystallised
itself into the concrete form — something must
be done in order that it can never occur again.
The higher intelligence of the nation must
assert itself. It must feel and think and act
in terms of internationalism. Not that the
feeling of nationalism in any country shall, or
even can be eradicated or even abated. It
must be made, however, to coordinate itself
with the now rapidly growing sense of world-
consciousness, that the growing intelligence
of mankind, aided by some tremendously con-
crete forms of recent experience, is now r>ecog-
nising as a great reality.

That there have been strong sympathies for

both the Allied Nations and for the Central

Powers in their titanic conflict, goes without

saying. How could it be otherwise, when we

191

iQ2 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

realise the diverse and complex types of our
citizenship ?

One of the most distinctive, and in some
ways one of the most significant, features of
the American nation is that it is today com-
posed of representatives, and in some cases, of
enormous bodies of representatives, number-
ing into the millions, of practically every na-
tion in the world.

There are single cities where, in one case
twenty-six, in another case twenty-nine, and
in other cases a still larger number of what
are today designated as hyphenated citizens
are represented. The orderly removal of the
hyphen, and the amalgamation of these splen-
did representatives of practically all nations
into genuine American citizens, infused with
American ideals and pushed on by true Ameri-
can ambitions, is one of the great problems
that the war has brought in a most striking
manner to our attention.

Not that these representatives of many
nations shall in any way lose their sense of
sympathy for the nations of their birth, in
times of either peace or of distress, although
they have found it either advisable or greatly
to their own personal advantage and welfare
to leave the lands of their birth and to estab-
lish their homes here.

The fact that in the vast majority of cases

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 193

they find themselves better off here, and choose
to remain and assume the responsibilities of
citizenship in the Western Republic, involves
a responsibility that some, if not indeed many,
heretofore have apparently too lightly con-
sidered. There must be a more supreme sense
of allegiance, and a continually growing sense
of responsibility to the nation, that, guided by
their own independent judgment and animated
by their own free wills, they have chosen as
their home.

There is a difference between sympathy and
allegiance ; and unless a man has found con-
ditions intolerable in the land of his birth,
and this is the reason for his seeking a home in
another land more to his liking and to his ad-
vantage, we cannot expect him to be devoid
of sympathy for the land of his birth, especially
in times of stress or of great need. We can
expect him, however, and we have a right to
demand his absolute allegiance to the land of
his adoption. And if he cannot give this, then
we should see to it that he return to his former
home. If he is capable of clear thinking and
right feeling, he also must realise the funda-
mental truth of this fact.

The time has now arrived when the great
mass of American people, including vast num-
bers of foreign birth, or children of those of
foreign birth, realise the grave dangers to

194 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

American institutions, and to the very nation
itself, in any hyphenated citizenship. There
will, moreover, be an insistent demand that
those who of their own choice choose to live
here, realise the duty of their supreme alle-
giance to one nation — and if they cannot give
this, that they then ~be compelled to get out.

There are public schools in America where
as many as nineteen languages are spoken in
a single room. Our public schools, so eagerly
sought by the children of parents of foreign
birth, in their intense eagerness for an educa-
tion that is offered freely and without cost to
all, can and must be made greater instruments
in converting what must in time become a
great menace to our institutions, and even to
the very life of the nation itself, into a real and
genuine American citizenship. Our best edu-
cators, in addition to our clearest thinking
citizens, are realising as never before, that our
public-school system chiefly, among our edu-
cational institutions, must be made a great
melting-pot through which this process of
amalgamation must be carried on.

We are also realising clearly now that, as a
nation, we have been entirely too lax in con-
nection with our immigration privileges, regu-
lations, and restrictions. We have been ad-
mitting foreigners to our shores in such enor-
mous quantities each year that we have not

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 195

been able at all adequately to assimilate them,
nor have we used at all a sufficiently wise dis-
crimination in the admission of desirables or
undesirables.

We have received, or we have allowed to be
dumped upon our shores, great numbers of the
latter whom we should know would inevitably
become dependents, as well as great numbers
of criminals. The result has been that they have
been costing certain localities millions of dol-
lars every year. But entirely aside from the
latter, the last two or three years have brought
home to us as never before the fact that those
who come to our shores must come with the
avowed and the settled purpose of becoming
real American citizens, giving full and abso-
lute allegiance to the institutions, the laws,
the government of the land of their adop-
tion.

If any other government is not able so to
manage as to make it more desirable for its
subjects to remain in the land of their birth,
rather than to seek homes in the land with in-
stitutions more to their liking, or with ad-
vantages more conducive to their welfare, that
government then should not expect to retain,
even in the slightest degree, the allegiance of
such former subjects. A hyphenated citizen-
ship may become as dangerous to a republic
as a cancer is in the human body. A country

ig6 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

with over a hundred hyphens cannot fulfil its
highest destiny.

The war has brought home to us as never
before also this tremendous fact. While of
late years there has been in America a tre-
mendous growth and quickening of thought
along the lines of internationalism, now rapidly
crystallising itself into the form of a World
Federation for the enforcement of peace and
a World Court for the arbitrament of all na-
tional differences that cannot be readily settled
by the nations involved, the war has brought
us as a people face to face with another great
fact. It is this: During the last several years
things have occurred, great forces have broken
forth that we and all peace-loving people
throughout the world thought well-nigh im-
possible. Treaties have been broken, inter-
national law has been strained, snapped, and
scrapped. The sovereign rights of neutral
nations have been violated.

Grim war has been thrust across their very
borders. One after another, neutral nations
have had their trade, their industries, their
commerce, interfered with, and in many cases
even utterly demoralised. Great amounts of
property have been destroyed, and numbers
of lives have been lost to them through the
grim, relentless tragedy of war which they
have had no hand in the making.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 197

We, as a nation, have been rudely shaken
from our long dream of almost inevitable
national security. We have been brought
finally, and although as a nation we have no
desire for conquest or empire, and no desire
for military glory, and therefore no need of
any great army or navy for offensive purposes,
we have been brought finally to realise that we
do, nevertheless, stand in need of a national
strengthening of our arm of defence. A land
of a hundred million people, where one could
travel many times for a sixmonth and never
see the sign of a soldier, is brought, though
reluctantly, to face a new state of affairs ; but
one, nevertheless, that must be faced — calmly
faced and wisely acted upon. And while it is
true that as a nation we have always had the
tradition of non-militarism, it is not true that
we have had the tradition of military or of
naval impotence or weakness.

Preparedness, therefore, has assumed a posi-
tion of tremendous importance, in individual
thought, in public discussion, and almost uni-
versally in the columns of the public press.
One of the most vital questions among us
today is, not so much as to how we shall pre-
pare, but how shall we prepare adequately for
defensive purposes, in case of any emergency
arising, without being thrown too far along
the road of militarism, and without an in-

ig8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

ordinate preparation that has been the scourge
and the bane of many old-world countries for
so many years, and that quite as much as any-
thing has been provocative of that horrible
conflict that has literally been devastating so
many European countries.

It is clearly apparent that the best thought
in America today calls for an adequate prepa-
ration for purposes of defence, and calls for a
recognition of facts as they are. It also clearly
sees the danger of certain types of mind and
certain interests combining to carry the matter
much farther than is at all called for. The
question is — How shall we then strike that
happy balance that is the secret of all suc-
cessful living in the lives of either individ-
uals or in the lives of nations?

All clear-seeing people realise that, as things
are in the world today, there is a certain
amount of preparedness that is necessary for
influence and for insurance. As within the
nation a police force is necessary for the en-
forcement of law, for the preservation of law
and order, although it is not at all necessary
that every second or third man be a policeman,
so in the council of nations the individual
nation must have a certain element of force
that it can fall back upon if all other available
agencies fail. In diplomacy the strong nations
win out, the weaker lose out. Military and

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 199

naval power, unless carried to a ridiculous
excess does not, therefore, lie idle, even when
not in actual use.

Our power and influence as a nation will
certainly not be in proportion to our weak-
ness. Although righteousness exalteth a
nation, it is nevertheless true that righteous-
ness alone will not protect a nation — while
other nations are fully armed. National weak-
ness does not make for peace.

Righteousness, combined with a spirit of
forbearance, combined with a keen desire to
give justice as well as to demand justice, if
combined with the power to strike powerfully
and sustainedly in defence of justice, and in
defence of national integrity, is what protects
a nation, and this it is that in the long run
exalteth a nation — while things are as they are.

While conditions have therefore brought
prominently to the forefront in America the
matter of military training and military serv-
ice— an adequate military preparation for pur-
poses of defence, for full and adequate defence,
the best thought of the nation is almost a unit
in the belief that, for us as a nation, an im-
mense standing army is unnecessary as well
as inadvisable.

It is a grave question in the minds of most
people, however, as to whether it should be
introduced into our public schools. To do so

200 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

is to change almost overnight, so to speak,
one of our most cherished American ideals. It
is the fundamental ideal of living on terms of
peace and good will with all nations — and re-
placing it with the ideal, military training.
Were the same time given to a more thorough
teaching of civics, thereby inculcating a far
greater acquaintanceship with, and working
knowledge of American institutions, political
methods, and political ideals, we would in the
long run be stronger as a nation, even in times
of any great crisis. Especially is this true of
the tremendous foreign element, continually
increasing, that we have in our public schools
throughout almost the entire country.

Let the military training come later, at a
more responsible age, and in a more systematic
manner. Let it be given by those fully com-
petent to give it. Let it be wholly under Fed-
eral control and let it be universal, beginning
at the age of eighteen and continuing to the
age of twenty-one. Let every youth in the
land then be required to be in attendance in
the training camp three months in the summer,
each summer, during these three years.

Let them there be given systematic military
training, combined with physical training,
hikes for endurance, training in hygiene, and
additional instruction in civics, inculcating
thereby not only a fuller sense of responsi-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 201

bility for the welfare and the safety of their
country in times of danger, but the still greater
and more needed responsibility of a citizen in
taking an intelligent and an efficient interest
in matters of government in times of peace,
and then the readiness to spring forth instantly
for service in case of any call for her defence.
Let the right of franchise— or the beginning
of voting, the assumption of full citizenship —
be dependent upon the ability to pass satis-
factory tests along all these lines, which in
hundreds of thousands of cases will make
citizenship and suffrage mean something,
where in the commonplace manner in which it
is assumed today it means but little in all too
many cases.

In this way also can real American citizens
be made out of the children of the vast num-
bers of foreigners that come annually to our
shores. In this way, also, under the guidance
of trained and well-equipped instructors and
leaders, can we amalgamate and build up a
true, a safe, and a sane American spirit. To
put military training in our schools, to put
wooden guns into the hands of school children,
is as consummately silly as it is foolhardy and
unnecessary. Let a wisely wrought out and a
standardised system of physical training be
introduced and systematically followed, be-
ginning at the age of eight and continuing

202 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

right through public, and high, and private
school.

Then when the age of eighteen years is
reached our young men would be prepared to
go into our national training camps and ac-
complish as much during the three months
through each of the three years that he is re-
quired to serve there, as could possibly be ac-
complished by attempting to string a military
training through the entire school course. In
this way we would get efficiently the required
result, without entirely perverting our Ameri-
can ideals and our American traditions, as well
as perverting if not poisoning our higher ideals
of education.

The bill that has recently been passed here
in our own state, the state of New York, re-
quiring military training to be introduced into
our schools and at an earlier age, will, I pre-
dict, be found so consummately silly that it
will in due course of time be abrogated. We
do not always act wisely when any particular
hysteria is on. Out of such action, however,
a saner type of action is eventually evolved.

This method of military training could be
made one of the greatest agencies imaginable
in the actualising of an ideal Democracy.
There all classes, rich and poor, natives and
foreigners, workers, artisans and college men,
those from both public and private schools,

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 203

will all meet on a common footing. The an-
nual conferring of citizenship upon those of
the third class, those who become twenty-one
years of age, could be made one of our
most interesting and stimulating national pub-
lic days. The swearing of allegiance to the
nation, the taking on of full citizenship, could
be made a ceremony on the various great
plains where the national training camps are
located — equipped and beautified as such —
quite as significant as were those occasions
when the Greek youths assumed the sense of
allegiance to their nation so many centuries
ago.

If the nation should bear the expenses of
each during the three annual periods of train-
ing, which I believe it should, thereby work-
ing no hardships on any, the cost would be
but an insignificant amount compared to the
tremendous cost of a large standing army.

No amount of military preparation that is
not combined definitely and completely with
an enhanced citizenship, and therefore with
an advance in real democracy, is at all worthy
of consideration on the part of the American
people, or indeed on the part of the people of
any nation. Pre-eminently is this true in this
day and age.

Observing this principle we could then,
while these vast numbers of young men are

204 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

being made ready, and to serve our immediate
needs, have an army of half a million men
without danger of militarism and without
heavy financial burdens, and without subvert-
ing our American ideas — providing it is an
industrial arm. There are great engineering
projects that could be carried on, thereby de-
veloping many of our now latent resources;
there is an immense amount of road-building
that could be projected in many parts of, if
not throughout the entire country; there are
great irrigation projects that could be carried
on in the far West and Southwest, reclaiming
millions upon millions of acres of what are
now unproductive desert lands ; all these could
be carried on and made even to pay, keeping
busy a half-million men for half a dozen years
to come.

This army of half a million men could be
recruited, trained to an adequate degree of
military service, and at the same time could
be engaged in profitable employment on these
much-needed works. They could then be paid
an adequate wage, ample to support a family,
or ample to lay up savings if without family.
Such men leaving the army service, would
then have a degree of training and skill
whereby they would be able to get positions
or employment, all more remunerative than
the bulk of them, perhaps, would ever be

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 205

able to get without such training and ex-
perience.

An army of half a million trained men,
somewhat equally divided between the At-
lantic and the Pacific seaboards, the bulk of
them engaged in regular constructive work,
work that needs to be done and that, therefore,
could be profitably done, and ready to be called
into service at a moment's notice, would con-
stitute a tremendous insurance against any
aggression from without, and would also give
a tremendous sense of security for half a dozen
years at least. This number could then be
reduced, for by that time several million young
men from eighteen years up would be partially
trained and in first-class physical shape to be
summoned to service should the emergency
arise.

In addition to the vast amount of good roads
building, whose cost could be borne in equal
proportions by nation, state, and county — a
most important factor in connection with mili-
tary necessity as well as a great economic
factor in the successful development and ad-
vancement of any community — the millions of
acres of now arid lands in the West, awaiting
only water to make them among the most val-
uable and productive in all the world, could be
used as a great solution of our immigration
problem.

206 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

Up to the year when the war began, there
came to our shores upwards of one million
immigrants every twelve months, seeking
work, and most of them homes in this country.
The great bulk of them got no farther than
our cities, increasing congestion, already in
many cases acute, and many of them becoming
in time, from one cause or another, depend-
ents, the annual cost of their maintenance
aggregating many millions every year.

With these vast acres ready for them large
numbers could, under a wise system of dis-
tribution, be sent on to the great West and
Southwest, and more easily and directly now
since the Panama Canal is open for navigation.
Allotments of these lands could be assigned
them that they could in time become owners
of, through a wisely established system of pay-
ments. Many of them would thereby be living
lives similar to those they lived in their own
countries, and for which their training and
experience there have abundantly fitted them.
They would thus become a far more valuable
type of citizens — landowners — than they could
ever possibly become otherwise, and especially
through our present unorganised hit-or-miss
system. They would in time also add annually
hundreds of millions of productive work to the
wealth of the country.

The very wise system that was inaugurated

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 207

some time ago in connection with the Coast
Defence arm of our army is, under the wise
direction of our present Secretary of War, to
be extended to all branches of the service.
For some time in the Coast Artillery Service
the enlisted man under competent instruction
has had the privilege of becoming a skilled
machinist or a skilled electrician. Now the
system is to be extended through all branches
of the military service, and many additional
trades are to be added to the curricula of the
trade schools of the army. The young man
can, therefore, make his own selection and be-
come a trained artisan at the same time that
he serves his time in the army, with all ex-
penses for such training, as well as mainte-
nance, borne by the Government. He can
thereby leave the service fully equipped for
profitable employment.

This will have the tendency of calling a
better class of young men into the service;
it will also do away with the well-founded
criticism that army life and its idleness, or
partly-enforced idleness, unfits a man for use-
ful industrial service after he quits the army.
If this same system is extended through the
navy, as it can be, both army and navy serv-
ice will meet the American requirement — that
neither military nor naval service take great
numbers of men from productive employment,

208 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

to be in turn supported by other workers. In-
stead of so much dead timber, they are all the
time producing while in active service, and are
being trained to be highly efficient as pro-
ducers, when they leave the service.

Under this system the Federal Government
can build its own ordnance works and its own
munition factories and become its own maker
of whatever may be required in all lines of
output. We will then be able to escape the
perverse influence of gain on the part of large
munition industries, and the danger that
comes from that portion of a military party
whose motives are actuated by personal gain.

If the occasion arises, or if we permit the
occasion to arise, Kruppism in America will
become as dangerous and as sinister in its in-
fluences and its proportions, as it became in
Germany.

The war has also taught us that we must
be awake to the folly of having the bulk of our
munition factories and our munition maga-
zines gathered within the radius of a few miles
along our Atlantic seaboard. They must be
wisely distributed over the entire country.

Another great service that the war has done
us, is by way of bringing home to us the les-
son that has been so prominently brought to
the front in connection with the other
nations at war, namely, the necessity of the

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT aog

speedy and thorough mobilisation of all lines
of industries and business ; for the thorough-
ness and the efficiency with which this can be
done may mean success that otherwise would
result in failure and disaster. We are now
awake to the tremendous importance of this.

The Committee on Industrial Preparedness
of the Naval Consulting Board is under the
chairmanship of one of our ablest engineers,
who is thoroughly organising the industries
of the country for readiness and action.
The responses of practically all our various
industries to the call that has been sent out as
to what they are best fitted for, and the ca-
pacity of their output have been very quick
and most satisfactory.

It is at last becoming clearly understood
among the peoples and the nations of the
world that, as a nation, we have no desire for
conquest, for territory, for empire — we have
no purposes of aggression; we have quite
enough to do to develop our resources and
our as yet great undeveloped areas.

A few months before the war broke, I had
conversations with the heads or with the rep-
resentatives of leading publishing houses in
several European countries. It was at a time
when our Mexican situation was beginning to
be very acute. I remember at that time espe-
cially, the conversation with the head of one of

2io HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

the largest publishing houses in Italy, in Milan.
I could see plainly his scepticism when, in
reply to his questions, I endeavoured to per-
suade him that as a nation we had no motives
of conquest or of aggression in Mexico, that
we were interested solely in the restoration of
a representative and stable government there.
And since that time, I am glad to say that our
acts as a nation have all been along the line
of persuading him, and also many other like-
minded ones in many countries abroad, of the
truth of this assertion. By this general course
we have been gaining the confidence and have
been cementing the friendship of practically
every South American republic, our imme-
diate neighbours on the southern continent.
This has been a source of increasing economic
power with us, and an element of greatly added
strength, and "also a tremendous energy work-
ing all the time for the preservation of peace.

One can say most confidently, even though
recognising our many grave faults as a nation,
that our course along this line has been such,
especially of late years, as to inspire confidence
on the part of all the fair-minded nations of
the world.

Without therefore any designs of aggres-
sion, any dreams of world empire, knowing
that we have quite enough to do to attend to
our own affairs as they are, the immediate

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 211

question is: how shall we be prepared, ade-
quately prepared for defence, without the enor-
mous burden, the nuisance, the dangers, and
the enormous cost of a large standing army?

Our theory of the state, the theory of de-
mocracy, is not that the state is above all,
and that the individual and his welfare are as
nothing when compared to it, but rather that
the state is the agency through which the
highest welfare of all its subjects is to be
evolved, expressed, maintained. No other
theory, to my mind, is at all compatible with
the intelligence of any free-thinking people.

Otherwise, there is always the danger and
also the likelihood, while human nature is as
it is, for some ruler, some clique, or factions so
to concentrate power into their own hands,
that for their own ambitions, for aggrandise-
ment, or for false or short-sighted and half-
baked ideas of additions to their country, it is
dragged into periodic wars with other nations.

Nor do we share in the belief that the state
is above morality, but rather that identically
the same moral ideals, precepts and obliga-
tions that bind individuals must be held sacred
by the state, otherwise it becomes a pirate
among nations, and it will inevitably in time be
hunted down and destroyed as such, however
great its apparent power. Nor do we as a
nation share in the belief that war is necessary

212 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

and indeed good for a nation, to inspire and
to preserve its manly qualities, its virility, and
therefore its power. Were this the only way
that this could be brought about, it might be
well and good; but the price to be paid is a
price that is too enormous and too frightful,
and the results are too uncertain. We believe
that these same ideals can be inculcated, that
these same energies can be used along useful,
conserving, constructive lines, rather than
along lines of destruction.

A nation may have the most colossal and
perfect military system in the world, and still
may suffer defeat in any given while, because
of those unseen things that pertain to the soul
of another people, whereby powers and forces
are engendered and materialised that make
defeat for them impossible; and in the matter
of big guns, it is well always to remember that
no nation can build them so great that another
nation may not build them still greater.
National safety does not necessarily lie in that
direction. Nor, on the other hand, along the
lines of extreme pacificism — surely not as long
as things are as they are. The argument of
the lamb has small deterrent effect upon the
wolf — as long as the wolf is a wolf. And
sometimes wolves hunt in packs. The most
preeminent lesson of the great war for us as
a nation should be this — there should be con-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 213

stantly a degree of preparedness sufficient to
hold until all the others, the various portions
of the nation, thoroughly coordinated and
ready, can be summoned into action. Thus
are we prepared, thus are we safe, and there
is no danger or fear of militarism.

In a democracy it should, it seems to me,
be a fundamental fact that hand in hand with
equal rights there should go a sense of equal
duty. A call for defence should have a uni-
versal response. So it is merely good common-
sense, good judgment, if you please, for all
the young men of the nation to have a train-
ing sufficient to enable them to respond ef-
fectively if the nation's safety calls them to
its defence. It is no crime, however we may
deprecate war, to be thus prepared.

For young men — and we must always re-
member that it is the young men who are
called for this purpose — for young men to be
called to the colours by the tens or the hun-
dreds of thousands, unskilled and untrained,
to be shot down, decimated by the thoroughly
trained and skilled troops of another nation,
or a combination of other nations, is indeed the
crime. Never, moreover, was folly so great as
that shown by him or by her who will not see.
And to look at the matter without prejudice,
we will realise that this is merely policing
what we have. It is meeting force wjjh

214 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

adequate force, if it becomes necessary, so to
meet it.

This is necessary until such time as we have
in operation among nations a machinery
whereby force will give place to reason,
whereby common sense will be used in ad-
justing all differences between nations, as it
is now used in adjusting differences between
individuals.

This is indeed our duty to ourselves and to
the nation; but it should not blind us to the
fact that there is immediately before us an-
other duty to the nation, conjointly with a
duty to all nations.

XIII

OUR SOLE AGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL

PEACE, AND INTERNATIONAL

CONCORD

The consensus of intelligent thought
throughout the world is to the effect that just
as we have established an orderly method for
the settlement of disputes between individuals
or groups of individuals in any particular
nation, we must now move forward and
establish such methods for the settlement of
disputes among nations. There is no civilised
country in the world that any longer permits
the individual to take the law into his own
hands.

The intelligent thought of the world now
demands the definite establishment of a World
Federation for the enforcement of peace
among nations. It demands likewise the defi-
nite establishment of a permanent World
Court backed by adequate force for the arbitra-
ment of all disputes among nations — unable
to be adjusted by the nations themselves in
friendly conference. We have now reached
the stage in world development and in world
intercourse where peace must be internation-
215

216 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

alised. Our present chaotic condition, which
exists simply because we haven't taken time
as yet to establish a method, must be made to
give place to an intelligently devised system
of law and order. Anything short of this
means a periodic destruction of the finest
fruits of civilisation. It means also the
periodic destruction of the finest young man-
hood of the world. This means, in turn, the
speedy degeneration of the human race. The
deification of force, augmented by all the prod-
ucts and engines of modern science, is simply
the way of sublimated savagery.

The world is in need of a new dispensation.
Recent events show indisputably that we have
reached the parting of the ways, the family of
nations must now push on into the new day or
the world will plunge on into a darker night.
There is no other course in sight. I know of
no finer words penned in any language — this
time it was in the French — to express an un-
varying truth than these words by Victor
Hugo : " There is one thing that is stronger
than armies, and that is an idea whose time
has come."

Never before, after viewing the great havoc
wrought, the enormous debts that will have
to be paid for between two and three hundred
years to come, the tremendous disruptions and
losses in trade, the misery and degradation

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 217

that stalks broadcast over every land engaged
in the war — scarcely a family untouched —
never before have nations been in the state of
mind to consider and to long to act upon some
sensible and comprehensive method of inter-
national concord and adjustments. If this
succeeds, the world, including ourselves, is the
gainer. If this does not succeed, though the
chances are overwhelmingly in its favour,
then we can proclaim to the assembled nations
that as long as a state of outlawry exists among
nations, that then no longer by chance, but by
design, we as a nation will be in a state of
preparedness broad and comprehensive enough
to defend ourselves against the violation of
any of the rights of a sovereign nation. It is
only in this way that we can show a due ap-
preciation of the struggles and the sacrifices
of those who gave us our national existence,
it is only in this way that we can retain our
self-respect, that we can command the respect
of other nations ivhile things are as they are;
that we can hope to retain any degree of in-
fluence and authority for the diplomatic arm
of our Government in the Council of Nations.

Every neutral nation has suffered tremen-
dously by the war. Every neutral nation will
suffer until a new world-order among nations
is projected and perfected.

We owe a tremendous duty to the world in

2i8 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

connection with this great world crisis and up-
heaval. Diligently should our best men and
women, those of insight and greatest influence,
and with the expenditure of both time and
means, seek to further the practical working
out of a World Federation and a permanent
World Court. Public opinion should be thus
aroused and solidified so that the world knows
that we stand as a united nation back of the
idea and the plan when the time comes for
those in authority formally to present or help
in presenting such plan before the assembled
representatives of the nations. Within the
past twelve months we have heard many clear-
cut endorsements of such an ideal and such a
plan from leading statesmen in England, in
Germany, in France, in Russia, that it would
seem impossible that with the right proce-
dure it cannot now be brought into operation.
The divine right of kings has gone. It holds
no more. We hear now and then, it is true,
some silly statement in regard to it, but little
attention is paid to it. The divine right of
priests has gone except in the minds of the
few remaining ignorant and herdable ones.
The divine right of dynasties — or rather of
dynasties to persist — seems to die a little
harder, but it is on the way. We are now
realising that the only divine right is the right
of the people — and all the people.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 219

Never again should it be possible for one
man, or for one little group of men so to lead,
or so to mislead a nation as to plunge it into
war. The growth of democracy compelling
the greater participation of all the people in
government must prohibit this. So likewise
the close relationship of the entire world now
should make it forever impossible for a single
nation or group of nations for any cause to
plunge a whole world or any part of it into
war. These are sound and clear-visioned
words recently given utterance to by James
Bryce : " However much we condemn reckless
leaders and the ruthless caste that live for
war, the real source of the mischief is the
popular sentiment behind them. The lesson
to be learned is that doctrines and deep-rooted
passions, whence these evils spring, can only
be removed by the slow and steady working
of spiritual forces. What most is needed is
the elimination of those feelings the teach-
ings of which breed jealousy and hatred
and prompt men to defiance and aggres-
sion."

Humanity and civilisation is not headed
towards Ab the cave-man, whatever appear-
ances, in the minds of many, may indicate at
the present time. Humanity will arise and
will reconstruct itself. Great lessons will be
learned. Good will result. But what a ter-

220 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

rific price to pay! What a terrific price to
pay to learn the lesson that " moral forces are
the only invincible forces in the universe"!
It has been slow, but steadily the world is ad-
vancing to that stage when the individual or
the nation that does not know that the law
of mutuality, of cooperation, and still more
the law of sympathy and good will, is the
supreme law in real civilisation, real advance-
ment, and real gain — who does not know that
its own welfare is always bound up with the
welfare of the greater whole — is still in the
brute stage of life and the bestial propensities
are still its guiding forces.

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred, national big-
headedness, must give way to respect, sym-
pathy, the desire for mutual understanding
and cooperation. The higher attributes must
and will assert themselves. The former are
the ways of periodic if not continuous de-
struction— the latter are the ways of the
higher spiritual forces that must prevail.
Significant are these words of one of our
younger but clear-visioned American poets,
Winter Dinner:

Whether the time be slow or fast,

Enemies, hand in hand,
Must come together at the last

And understand.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 221

No matter how the die is cast,
Or who may seem to win —

We know that we must love at last —
Why not begin?'

The teaching of hatred to children, the
fostering of hatred in adults, can result only
in harm to the people and the nation where
it is fostered. The dragon's tooth will leave
its marks upon the entire nation and the fair
life of all the people will suffer by it. The
holding in contempt of other people makes it
sometimes necessary that one's own head be
battered against the wall that he may be suffi-
ciently aroused to recognise and to appreciate
their sterling and enduring qualities.

The use of a club is more spectacular for
some at least than the use of intellectual and
moral forces. The rattling of the machine-gun
produces more commotion than the more
quiet ways of peace. All of the powerful
forces in nature, those of growth, germination,
and conservation, the same as in human life
are quiet forces. So in the preservation of
peace. It consists rather in a high construc-
tive policy. It requires always clear vision,
a constantly progressive and cooperative
method of life and action; frank and open
dealing and a resolute purpose. It is won and
maintained by nothing so much in the long

222 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

run as when it makes the Golden Rule its law
of conduct. Slowly we are realising that great
armaments — militarism — do not insure peace.
They may lead away from it — they are very
apt to lead away from it.

Peace is related rather to the great moral
laws of conduct. It has to do with straight,
clean, open dealing. It is fostered by sym-
pathy, forbearance. This does not mean that
it pertains to weakness. On the contrary it is
determined by resolute but high purpose, the
actual and active desire of a nation to live on
terms of peace with all other nations ; and the
world's recognition of this fact is a most
powerful factor in inducing and in actualising
such living.

Our own achievement of upwards of a hun-
dred years in living in peaceable, sympathetic
and mutually beneficial relations with Canada ;
Canada's achievement in so living with us,
should be a distinct and clear-cut answer to
the argument that nations need to fortify their
boundaries one against another. This is true
only where suspicion, mistrust, fear, secret
diplomacy, and secret alliances hold instead of
the great and eternally constructive forces —
sympathy, good will, mutual understanding, in-
duced and conserved by an International Joint
Commission of able men whose business it is
to investigate, to determine, and to adjust any

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 223

differences that through the years may arise.
Here we have a boundary line of upwards of
three thousand miles and not a fort; vast
areas of inland seas and not a war vessel ; and
for upwards of a hundred years not a differ-
ence that the High Joint Commission has not
been able to settle amicably and to the mutual
advantage of both countries.

I know that in connection with this we have
an advantage over the old-world nations be-
cause we are free from age-long prejudices,
hatreds, and past scores. But if this great
conflict does not lead along the lines of the
constructive forces and the working out of a
new world method, then the future of Europe
and of the world is dark indeed. Surely it
will lead to a new order — it is almost incon-
ceivable that it will not.

The Golden Rule is a wonderful developer
in human life, a wonderful harmoniser in com-
munity life — with great profit it could be ex-
tended as the law of conduct in international
relations. It must be so extended. Its very
foundation is sympathy, good will, mutuality,
love.

The very essence of Jesus' entire revelation
and teaching was love. It was not the teach-
ing of weakness or supineness in the face of
wrong, however. There was no failure on his
part to smite wrong when he saw it — wrong

224 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

taking the form of injustice or oppression.
He had, as we have seen, infinite sympathy for
and forbearance with the weak, the sinful;
but he had always a righteous indignation
and a scathing denunciation for oppression —
for that spirit of hell that prompts men or
organisations to seek, to study to dominate
the minds and thereby the lives of others. It
was, moreover, that he would not keep silent
regarding the deadly ecclesiasticism that bore
so heavily upon his people and that had well-
nigh crushed all their religious life whence
are the very springs of life, that he aroused
the deadly antagonism of the ruling hierarchy.
And as he, witnessing for truth and freedom,
steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression,
so those who catch his spirit today will do
as he did and will realise as duty — " While
wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace ! "

Peace? Peace? Peace?
While wrong is wrong let no man prate of

peace !
He did not prate, the Master. Nay, he smote !

Hate wrong! Slay wrong! Else mercy, jus-
tice, truth,
Freedom and faith, shall die for humankind.*

* From that strong, splendid poem, " Buttadeus,"
by William Samuel Johnson.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 225

Nor did the code and teachings of Jesus
prevent him driving the money-changers from
out the temple court. It was not for the pur-
pose of doing them harm. It was rather to do
them good by driving home to them in some
tangible and concrete form, through the skin
and flesh of their bodies, what the thick skins
of their moral natures were unable to compre-
hend. The resistance of wrongdoing is not
opposed to the law of love. As in community
life there is the occasional bully who has
sometimes to be knocked down in order that
he may have a due appreciation of individual
rights and community amenities, so among
nations a similar lesson is sometimes neces-
sary in order that it or its leaders may learn
that there are certain things that do not pay,
and, moreover, will not be allowed by the com-
munity of nations.

Making might alone the basis of national
policy and action, or making it the basis of
settlement in international settlements, but
arouses and intensifies hatred and the spirit
of revenge. So in connection with this great
world crisis — after it all then comes the great
problem of reorganisation and rehabilitation,
and unless there comes about an international
concord strong and definite enough to prevent
a recurrence of what has been, it would almost
seem that restoration were futile; for things

226 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

will be restored only in time to be destroyed
again.

No amount of armament we know now will
prevent war. It can be prevented only by a
definite concord of the nations brought finally
to realise the futility of war. To deny the
possibility of a World Federation and a World
Court is to deny the ability of men to govern
themselves. The history of the American Re-
public in its demonstration of the power and
the genius of federation should disprove the
truth of this. Here we have a nation com-
posed of forty-eight sovereign states and with
the most heterogeneous accumulation of peo-
ple that ever came together in one country, let
alone one nation, and great numbers of them
from those nations that for upwards of a thou-
sand years have been periodically springing
at one another's throats. Enlightened self-
government has done it. The real spirit and
temper of democracy has done it. But it must
be the preservation of the real spirit of de-
mocracy and constant vigilance that must
preserve it.

Our period of isolation is over. We have
become a world-nation. Equality of rights
presupposes equality of duty. In our very
souls we loathe militarism. Conquest and
aggression are foreign to our spirit, and for-
eign to our thoughts and ambitions. But

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 227

weakness will by no means assure us immunity
from aggression from without. Universal
military trainmg up to a reasonable point, and
the joint sense of responsibility of every man
and every woman in the nation, and the right
of the national government to expect and to
demand that every man and woman stand
ready to respond to the call to service,
whatever form it may take — this is our
armour.

All intelligent people know that the national
government has always had the power to draft
every male citizen fit for service into military
service. It is not therefore a question of uni-
versal military service. The real and only
question is whether these or great numbers of
these go out illy prepared and equipped as
sheep to the shambles perchance, or whether
they go out trained and equipped to do a man's
work — more adequately prepared to protect
themselves as well as the integrity of the
nation. It is not to be done for the love or
the purpose of militarism ; but recognising the
fact that militarism still persists, that with us
it may not be triumphant should we at any
time be forced to face it. There are certain
facts that only to our peril as well as our
moral degradation, we can be blind to. Said
a noted historian but a few days ago:

228 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

" I loathe war and militarism. I have fought
them for twenty years. But I am a historian,
and I know that bullies thrive best in an at-
mosphere of meekness. As long as this mili-
tary system lasts you must discourage the
mailed fist by showing that you will meet it
with something harder than a boxing glove.
We do not think it good to admit into the code
of the twentieth century that a great national
bully may still with impunity squeeze the
blood out of its small neighbours and seize
their goods."

We need not fear militarism arising in
America as long as the fundamental principles
of democracy are preserved and continually
extended, which can be done only through the
feeling of the individual responsibility of every
man and every woman to take a keen and con-
stant interest in the matters of their own gov-
ernment— community, state, national, and now
international. We must realise and ever more
fully realise that in a government such as ours,
the people are the government, and that when
in it anything goes wrong, or wrongs and in-
justices are allowed to grow and hold sway,
we are to blame.

Universal military training has not mili-
tarised Switzerland nor has it Australia. It
is rather the very essence of democracy and
the very antithesis of militarism.

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT MQ

" Let each son of Freedom bear
His portion of the burden. Should not each

one do his share?
To sacrifice the splendid few —
The strong of heart, the brave, the true,
Who live— or die — as heroes do,
While cowards profit — is not fair ! "

Many still recall that not a few well-mean-
ing people at the close of the Civil War pro-
claimed that, with upwards of two million
trained men behind him, General Grant would
become a military dictator, and that this would
be followed by the disappearance of democ-
racy in the nation. But the mind, the temper,
the traditions of our people are all a guaran-
tee against militarism. The gospel, the hal-
lucination of the shining armour, the will to
power, has no attraction for us. We loathe
it; nor do we fear its undermining and crush-
ing our own liberties internally. Nevertheless,
it is true that vigilance is always and always
will be the price of liberty. There must be a
constant education towards citizenship. There
must be an alert democracy, so that any land
and sea force is always the servant of the
spirit; for only otherwise it can become its
master — but otherwise it will become its
master.

Prejudice, suspicion, hatred on the part of

230 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

individuals or on the part of the people of one
nation against the people of another nation,
have never yet advanced the welfare of any
individual or any nation and never can. The
world war is but the direct result of the type
of peace that preceded it. The militarist argu-
ment reduced to its lowest terms amounts
merely to this : " For two nations to keep
peace each must be stronger than the other."
The real hope of preserving amicable relations,
and, therefore, of maintaining a permanent
peace, lies not in this direction; nor in the
direction of making war physically impossible ;
but rather in making it spiritually impossible.
The open expression and the systematised
efforts of public opinion is the only thing that
will effectually hasten the moment when a
decisive move is made for culminating the
new order of world relations, including the
orderly procedure in the examination and the
settling of international disputes or differ-
ences.

Representative men of other countries do
not resent our part in pressing this matter and
in taking the leadership in it. But even if they
did they would have no just right to. There
is, however, a very general feeling that the
American Republic, as the world's greatest
example of successful federation, should take
the lead in the World Federation, and espe-

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 231

cially at this time when their own hands are
so full and are virtually tied. The following
words by James Bryce, spoken some time ago,
are but representative of a very general con-
sensus of opinion abroad in this regard:

" The creation of some international alliance
embracing all peace-loving nations could
hardly succeed without the cooperation of the
greatest of all neutral nations. With that co-
operation, difficult as the effort to construct
such a scheme will be, there is at least a real
hope of success. Largely in vain will this war
have been fought and all these sufferings en-
dured if the peoples of the world are to fall
back into a state of permanent alarm, sus-
picion; and the hospitality of each would be
weighed down by the frightful burden of ar-
maments. Let us hope that the proffered help
of America will encourage the statesmen of
Europe and draw from them a responsive
note." And again : " The obstacles in the way
of creating such a league are many and
obvious, but whatever else may come out of
the war, we in England hope that one result
of it will be the creation of some machinery
calculated to avert the recurrence of so awful
a calamity as that from which mankind is now
suffering."

232 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

And a few days later, speaking of a World
League to secure future peace, the Secretary
of Foreign Affairs of one of the great nations
at war said:

" I believe the best work neutrals can do
for the moment is to try to prevent a war like
this from happening again. It is a work of
neutral countries to which we should all look
with favour and hope. Only, we* must bear
this in mind: if the nations after the war are
able to do something effective by binding
themselves with the common object of pre-
serving peace, they must be prepared to under-
take no more than they are able to uphold by
force, and to see, when the time of crisis
comes, that it is upheld by force. The ques-
tion we must ask them is : ' Will you play up
when the time comes?' It is not merely the
sign-manual of Presidents and sovereigns that
is really to make that worth while; it must
also have behind it Parliaments and national
sentiments."

A well-known German authority on Inter-
national Law and representative also of the
German government at The Hague Conference,
Professor Philip Zorn, in a notable article in
" Der Tag " some time ago, spoke of his readi-
ness to accept an ending of the war by an

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 233

international conference and settlement that
would insure the prevention of future wars,
and added : " The problem of resolving all
quarrels through the arbitration method
offers, it is true, great difficulties, but not in-
surmountable ones."

This is now going to be greatly fostered by
virtue of one great good that the world war
will eventually have accomplished — the doom
and the end of autocracy. Dynasties and privi-
leged orders that have lived and lived alone on
militarism, will have been foreclosed on. The
people in control, in an increasingly intelligent
control of their own lives and their own gov-
ernments, will be governed by a higher degree
of self-enlightenment and mutual self-interest
than under the domination or even the leader-
ship of any type of hereditary ruling class or
war-lord. In some countries autocracy in re-
ligion, through the free mingling and discus-
sions of men of various nationalities and re-
ligious persuasions, will be again lessened,
whereby the direct love and power of God in
the hearts of men, as Jesus taught, will have
a fuller sway and a more holy and a diviner
moulding power in their lives.

It was during those long, weary years
coupled with the horrible crimes of the Thirty
Years' War that the science of International
Law began to take form, the result of that

234 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

notable work, " De Jure Belli ac Pads," by
Grotius. It is ours to see that out of this
more intense and thereby even more horrible
conflict a new epoch in human and inter-
national relations be born.

As the higher powers of mind and spirit are
realised and used, great primal instincts im-
pelling men to expression and action that find
their outlet many times in war, will be trans-
muted and turned from destruction into power-
ful engines of construction. When a moral
equivalent for war of sufficient impelling
power is placed before men, those same virile
qualities and powers that are now marshalled
so easily for purposes of fighting, will, under
the guidance and in the service of the spirit,
be used for the conserving of human life, and
for the advancement and the increase of every-
thing that administers to life, that makes it
more abundant, more mutual, and more happy.
And God knows that the call for such service
is very great.

Our time needs again more the prophet and
less the priest. It needs the God-impelled life
and voice of the prophet with his face to the
future, both God-ward and man-ward, burn-
ing with an undivided devotion to truth and
righteousness. It needs less the priest, too
often with his back to the future and too often
the pliant tool of the organisation whose

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 235

chief concern is, and ever has been, the preser-
vation of itself under the ostensible purpose
of the preservation of the truth once delivered,
the same that Jesus with his keen powers of
penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high
moral guide and as an inspirer to high and
unself-centred endeavour, and that he char-
acterised with such scathing scorn. There are
splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now
even as it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not
a system; with righteousness, not custom;
with justice, not expediency. Is there a man
who would dare say that if Christianity — the
Christianity of the Christ — had been actually
in vogue, in practice in all the countries of
Christendom during the last fifty years, dur-
ing the last twenty-five years, that this colos-
sal and gruesome war would ever have come
about? No clear-thinking and honest man
would or could say that it would. We need
again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing,
high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again
the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us
back to those simple fundamental teachings
of the Christ of Nazareth, that are life-giving
to the individual, and that are world-saving.

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and
the common man, especially in times like
these, asks what it is, where it is — and God

236 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

knows that we have been for many hundred
years wandering in the wilderness. He is
thinking that that Kingdom of God on earth
that the true teachings of Jesus predicated, and
that he laboured so hard to actualise, needs
some speeding up. There is a world-wide
yearning for spiritual peace and righteousness
on the part of the common man. He is finding
it occasionally in established religion, but
often, perhaps more often, independently of
it. He is finding it more often through his
own contact and relations with the Man of
Nazareth — for him the God-man. There is no
greater fact in our time, and there is no greater
hope for the future than is to be found in this
fact.

We need a stock-taking and a mobilisation
of our spiritual forces. But what, after all,
does this mean? Search as we may we are
brought back every time to this same Man of
Nazareth, the God-man — Son of Man and Son
of God. And gathering it into a few brief sen-
tences it is this: Jesus' great revelation was
this consciousness of God in the individual
life, and to this he witnessed in a supreme and
masterly way, because this he supremely real-
ised and lived. Faith in him and following
him does not mean acquiring some particular
notion of God or some particular belief about
him himself. It is the living in one's own life

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 237

of this same consciousness of God as one's
source and Father, and a living in these same
filial relations with him of love and guidance
and care that Jesus entered into and con-
tinuously lived.

When this is done there is no problem and
no condition in the individual life that it will
not clarify, mould, and therefore take care of;
for "fjirj fj.spifj.vaTe rrj fyvx?f v).icav "— do not
worry about your life — was the Master's clear-
cut command. Are we ready for this high
type of spiritual adventure? Not only are we
assured of this great and mighty truth that
the Master revealed and going ahead of us
lived, that under this supreme guidance we
need not worry about the things of the life,
but that under this Divine guidance we need
not think even of the life itself, if for any
reason it becomes our duty or our privi-
lege to lay it down. Witnessing for truth and
standing for truth he again.preceded us in this.

But this, this love for God or rather this
state that becomes the natural and the normal
life when we seek the Kingdom, and the Divine
rule becomes dominant and operative in mind
and heart, leads us directly back to his other
fundamental: Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself. For if God is my Father and if he
cares for me in this way — and every other man
in the world is my brother and He cares for

238 HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT

him in exactly the same way — then by the
sanction of God his Father I haven't anything
on my brother; and by the love of God my
Father my brother hasn't anything on me. It
is but the most rudimentary commonsense
then, that we be considerate one of another,
that we be square and decent one with an-
other. We will do well as children of the
same Father to sit down and talk matters over ;
and arise with the conclusion that the advice
of Jesus, our elder brother, is sound : " There-
fore all things whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them."

He gave it no label, but it has subsequently
become known as the Golden Rule. There is
no higher rule and no greater developer of the
highest there is in the individual human life,
and no greater adjuster and beautifier of the
problems of our common human life. And
when it becomes sufficiently strong in its ac-
tion in this, the world awaits its projection
into its international life. This is the truth
that he revealed — the twofold truth of love to
God and love for the neighbour, that shall make
men free. The truth of the Man of Nazareth
still holds and shall hold, and we must realise
this adequately before we ask or can expect
any other revelation.

We are in a time of great changes. The
discovery of new laws and therefore of new

HIGHER POWERS OF MIND AND SPIRIT 239

truth necessitates changes and necessitates
advances. But whatever changes or advances
may come, the Divine reality still survives, in-
dependent of Jesus it is true, but as the world
knows him still better, it will give to him its
supreme gratitude and praise, in that he was
the most perfect revealer of God to man, of
God in man, and the most concrete in that he
embodied and lived this truth in his own
matchless human-divine life ; and stands as the
God-man to which the world is gradually ap-
proaching. For as Goethe has said — " We can
never get beyond the spirit of Jesus."

Do you know that incident in connection
with the little Scottish girl? She was trudg-
ing along, carrying as best she could a boy
younger, but it seemed almost as big as she
herself, when one remarked to her how heavy
he must be for her to carry, when instantly
came the reply : " He's na heavy. He's mi
brither." Simple is the incident; but there is
in it a truth so fundamental that pondering
upon it, it is enough to make many a man, to
whom dogma or creed make no appeal, a
Christian — and a mighty engine for good in
the world. And more — there is in it a truth
so fundamental and so fraught with potency
and with power, that its wider recognition and
projection into all human relations would re-
construct a world.

/ sa<a) the mountains stand
Silent, 'wonderful, and grand,
Looking out across the land
When the golden light was falling
On distant dome and spire ;
And I heard a low voice calling,
" Come up higher, come up higher.
From the lowland and the mire,
From the mist of earth desire,
From the vain pussvit of pelf,
From the attitude of self:
Come up higher, c^me up higher. '
—James G. Clarke

341

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